A single quip about Melania Trump stole the show on Jimmy Kimmel Live! The part came during the late-night show host’s dissection of Donald Trump’s Iran deal on Thursday night. After the White House published a 14-point memorandum laying out the terms of the U.S.-Iran agreement, Kimmel spent much of his monologue walking viewers through what he saw as a string of costly concessions. But it was his joke about the First Lady that landed loudest.
Jimmy Kimmel jokes about Donald Trump’s Iran deal
The late-night show host built his punchline methodically. He told his audience that, according to a CNN intelligence source, the U.S. had effectively handed Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz as part of the deal.
Jimmy Kimmel then stacked up what he described as the full list of outcomes from Donald Trump’s roughly four-month war with Iran: the Ayatollah was replaced by a younger, reportedly more hardline successor; sanctions that predated the war were lifted; a ceasefire was reached that, in Kimmel’s view, merely restored what already existed before the fighting started. And the U.S. agreed to transfer at least $300 billion.
“We threw in a minimum of $300 billion, because why not?” Kimmel said. Then, nodding to the sheer scale of what the U.S. had agreed to hand over, the comedian quipped, “Right now, Melania is wondering, ‘How do I get a deal like that?'”
Kimmel did not stop there. When Trump threatened to resume bombing if Iran violated the agreement, saying the U.S. would drop bombs “right smack in the middle of their head,” Kimmel joked, “If they don’t behave, we will bomb them, and we will take their iPads away for a year.”
The monologue also touched on Trump’s conduct at the G7 summit in France, where the president reportedly arrived 45 minutes late to a meeting with world leaders. Trump described the Iran deal at the summit as “a very strong deal… Nobody knows what it is, but it’s very strong” — a line Kimmel compared to how someone might describe “the smell of a dead person before you find the body.”
