Jimmy Kimmel Says He Was Told Not to Read Donald Trump Post at Oscars

It’s rare that the Oscars — let alone any awards show — actually runs ahead of schedule, but that’s the situation Jimmy Kimmel found himself in last night as the three-and-a-half-hour program looked set to end a few minutes early. Any seasoned comedian would’ve been able to improvise something to fill time, but luckily, the Bit Gods had looked favorably upon Kimmel and gifted him the best possible material: A characteristically long, disgruntled, borderline incomprehensible review of the 2024 Oscars from Donald Trump posted on Truth Social.

Of course, Kimmel read the post. And unsurprisingly — he revealed after the show — there were some folks who did not want him to read the post. 

Speaking with Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos in a post-show interview, Kimmel recalled being told (ostensibly by the show’s producers) that he “had a little bit of time” before the final big awards were given out. His response was immediate: “I’m reading the Trump tweet. They were like, ‘No, no, don’t read it!’ Oh yes, I am!” 

The bit was one of the highlights of the night and the kind of thing that’s so in Kimmel’s wheelhouse it would’ve been totally believable as something Kimmel and his writing team had cooked up from whole cloth beforehand. It probably says more about Trump that, at this point, the man’s own posts sound like parodies of themselves. Like, if you’d told us a fully-staffed writers room had come up with the idea to not only randomly rope ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos into a diatribe about Jimmy Kimmel hosting the Oscars — and refer to him as “George Slopanopoulos” — it would’ve easily passed the smell test.