In the wake of former President Barack Obama issuing an angry statement online about ABC’s decision to indefinitely suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show over the horrific comments he made about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went scorched earth and totally torched the former president.
As background, ABC’s corporate owner, Disney, decided to indefinitely suspend Kimmel after he claimed on air that Kimmel was killed by a MAGA Republican, joked about Kirk’s death, and then refused to apologize. ABC broadcasters began announcing that they would not air his program at all, and so the decision to suspend Kimmel so as to save that relationship with the broadcasters, advertisers, and audience followed in short order.
Obama, however, was furious at the idea that a comedian could be fired for not being funny and putting the network at risk. He said, in an angry post on X, “After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.”
Speaking to former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Fox News Channel, Karoline Leavitt sounded off on Obama and exposed that he is utterly ignorant of what was really going on here. Beginning, she snapped, “With all due respect to former President Obama, he has no idea what he’s talking about.”
Continuing, she noted that, contrary to Obama’s claims, the decision to file Kimmel was an internal one at ABC, not one foisted on them by the Trump government. She said, “The decision to fire Jimmy Kimmel and to cancel his show came from executives at ABC that has now been reported, and I can assure you, it did not come from the White House, and there was no pressure given from the President of the United States.”
She further added that Trump was disengaged from that particular issue because of the need to prepare for his trip to the United Kingdom, where he met with King Charles III in a major state visit that was the first time an American president has twice been hosted and engaged with by the royal family.
Commenting on that aspect of the situation, she said, “And how do I know that Kayleigh, because I was with the President of the United States when this news broke in the United Kingdom, we were enjoying the beautiful and spectacular state visit that was put forth by the royal family and the Prime Minister of the UK, Keir Starmer.”
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Tying that back to the Kimmel issue, Leavitt told McEnany, “And I actually brought this news to President Trump’s attention. He had no idea this was happening. It was a decision that was made by ABC because Jimmy Kimmel chose to knowingly lie to his audience on his program about the death of a highly respected man when our country is in a state of mourning.”
Watch her sound off on Obama here: