WASHINGTON — Jimmy Kimmel predicted his own demise the day after President Donald Trump won the 2024 election, assuming he was on the president’s “list of enemies’’ and should give up — before vowing reverently to keep his own “very important voice’’ on air.
Kimmel, who was “indefinitely” sidelined from his eponymous show on Wednesday, told his sidekick Guillermo in a “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” opening sketch taped after Vice President Kamala Harris’ brutal loss to Trump last November that he was “leaving the country.”
“I can’t stay for another four years of this — who knows what he’s going to do?” he balked. “You’ve heard him. He said he has a list of enemies. You think I’m not on that list?”
Guillermo, whose full name is Guillermo Rodriguez, countered, “Jimmy, we need you to help us get through this. You have a very important voice.”
“I do?” Kimmel replied. “Maybe you’re right.”
The TV host then spent his 10-minute, sometimes-teary monologue grousing about Trump’s victory and how it was “a terrible night for women, for children, for the hundreds of thousands of hard working immigrants who make this country go, for health care, for our climate, for science, for journalism, for justice, for free speech.”
“It was a terrible night for poor people, for the middle class, for seniors who rely on Social Security, for our allies in Ukraine, for NATO and democracy and decency,” he continued in a mawkish tone.
“And it was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him. And guess what? It was a bad night for everyone who voted for him too. You just don’t realize it yet.”
After making a “joke” about sharing a jail cell with Taylor Swift, Kimmel quipped: “We’ll see how funny that is in six months. When the great talkshow host roundup begins.”
Ten months later, ABC executives pulled him off the air — but his ratings had started nose-dived almost immediately after the election, as he resumed his Trump tirades.
Monthly Nielsen figures showed “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” fell to just 1.1 million total viewers in August 2025, were cut nearly in half from January’s 1.95 million, trailing behind every one of his late night peers.
Here’s the latest on Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension after Charlie Kirk comments
Kimmel’s August household rating of 0.35 was his lowest point of the year. Viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 were his worst demographic.
The “Man Show” alum averaged only 129,000 viewers in that bracket in August, off from 212,000 in January and less than half his June peak of 284,000.
Kimmel was indefinitely canned got into trouble early in his monologue Monday night when he decided to talk about the brutal killing of Kirk at an event at Utah Valley University in Orem last week.
“We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” he told the audience at the El Capitan Entertainment Centre in Hollywood, California.
Kirk, 31, was fatally shot amid his “American Comeback” college speaking tour on the campus of Utah Valley University on Sept. 10.
Tyler Robinson, a “radicalized” 22-year-old with a live-in trans partner, was captured 33 hours later and charged with Kirk’s murder.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox had told The Wall Street Journal in a piece published Sept. 13 that Robinson subscribed to a “leftist ideology.”
Kimmel’s deal with ABC had been slated to run through May 2026 under a three-year extension signed in September 2022 — but he was abruptly pulled before his show aired Wednesday night.
The $16-million-per-year late-night host has refused to apologize for his remarks during his Monday monologue, part of the reason that Disney CEO Bob Iger and TV boss Dana Walden pulled the show.
Kimmel reportedly told execs that he intended to “clarify” his remarks in an upcoming monologue — only to double down and signal he was going to go after Trump supporters again.
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