Supporters of First Lady Melania Trump are now in the process of putting together a massive boycott of advertisers for ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! after a report came out following the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner said that Disney is “ready to pull the plug” on the program.
Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made comments on his program just days before the incident, fantasizing about the president’s death, which might serve as the straw that broke the camel’s back for ABC’s parent company. During his program, he referred to Melania as an “expectant widow” which upset scores of the First Lady’s fans.
One individual took to social media platform X and said, “Starting today, I won’t buy any products advertised on the @jimmykimmel Show.” The commenter shared a photo of “top current advertisers” for the program, which includes major corporations such as Allstate, McDonald’s, and Starbucks. The user was responding to a post on X from Melania Trump herself which said, “Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country.”
According to a report from Breitbart News, the First Lady then added, “His monologue about my family isn’t comedy – his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America. Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”
Kimmel, as usual, waved off the criticism and doubled down on his comments, attempting to explain it all away by claiming the joke was about the couple’s “age difference.” However, as a result of his careless and vile comments, a grassroots boycott of his advertisers, who pay a healthy sum of money to Disney to run ads on the show, has taken off across the country.
The pressure being applied to Disney’s advertisers comes as a new report from The Sun says that ABC could be on the verge of canceling Kimmel’s program “for good.” The report also said that the network’s affiliates “have already been ordered to drop promotional clips for the show” after the First Lady shredded Kimmel for his distasteful joke.
“Stations which carry ABC around the country were told to pull Kimmel’s slated promos from their lineups this week,” an ABC insider told the publication. “The move to pull Kimmel completely seems imminent.” The Sun also stated that ABC is experiencing a critical time with regard to advertising revenue, prompting the theory that Disney might take the “easy way out” by pulling the show off the air.
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However, a report from Page Six says the complete opposite, quoting a source who said, “Jimmy Kimmel isn’t going anywhere.” In fact, according to the source, the network is standing with him and doesn’t plan to suspend him, fire him, or cancel his program. President Trump has already made calls for Kimmel to be booted from the network. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung had stronger words for Kimmel, referring to him as a “s**t human” for “doubling down on that joke instead of doing the decent thing by apologizing.”
Watch the comments from Kimmel that inspired the boycott below: