Jimmy Kimmel And Stephen Colbert Unload On Trump In Rare Crossover Event As Guests On Each Other's Shows

Late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert were each other's guests in a special crossover event on Tuesday and took the opportunity to call out "son of a b*tch" President Donald Trump, who has used his influence in attempts to silence them for criticizing him and his MAGA movement on the air.

Last week, ABC announced it would end its suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! just a week after Trump pushed to get host Jimmy Kimmel off the air following comments Kimmel made about the assassination of far-right activist Charlie Kirk. ABC had had internal discussions with Disney, which saw a wave of subscriber cancellations in the wake of Kimmel's suspension.

When Kimmel returned, he called out the government interference that led to his suspension, saying that Trump "celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke" and is now "openly rooting for NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers and the hundreds of Americans who work for their shows who don’t make millions of dollars.”

Colbert has also been impacted by Trump. Over the summer, CBS, citing economic concerns, announced that his program would go off the air next May—news that came as its parent company, Paramount, sought government approval for a merger with Skydance.

Paramount executives insisted the move bears no relation "to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.” The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the merger after Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Trump, which Colbert said amounted to a payoff to secure approval for the merger.

Kimmel posted a photo of himself with Colbert and fellow late-night host Seth Meyers along with the caption "Hi Donald!" last night.

@jimmykimmel/Threads

You can also watch Kimmel's appearance on Colbert's show below.

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Colbert asked Kimmel, "Did you ever think the President of the United States would be celebrating your unemployment?”—to which Kimmel replied:

"I mean, that son of a b*tch. No, I never imagined that we’d ever have a president like this, and I hope we don’t ever have another president like this again."

"I never even imagined there would ever be a situation in which the president of our country was celebrating hundreds of Americans losing their jobs. But somebody who took pleasure in that, that to me is the absolute opposite of what a leader of this country is supposed to be.”

Kimmel also revealed how he learned that his show had been taken off the air:

"It was about 3 o'clock, we tape our show at 4:30. I'm in my office, typing away as I usually do, I get a phone call. It's ABC. They say they want to talk to me. This is unusual. They—as far as I knew—didn't even know I was doing a show previous to this."

"I have like five people who work in my office with me. So the only private place to go is the bathroom. So I go into the bathroom, and I'm on the phone with the ABC executives, and they say, 'Listen, we want to take the temperature down. We're concerned about what you're going to say tonight, and we decided that the best route is to take the show off the air."

"I put my pants back on, and I walked out to my office, and I called in some of the executive producers. There are about nine people in there. And I said, 'They're pulling the show off the air.' And I was—my wife said I was white, I was whiter than Jim Gaffigan when I came out of there."

"I thought, that's it, it's over. It is over. I was like I'm never coming back on the air. That's really what I thought. So we told our staff—meanwhile the whole audience was in their seats."

You can watch Colbert's appearance on Kimmel's program below.

Kimmel, when Colbert appeared on his program, said he'd texted Colbert to let him know about the suspension, to which Colbert recalled:

"I was on stage, I had just finished the show... my executive producer comes over and says, 'Hey, I just got this text from Carrie and I think it's right to show it to you.' And that's how I found out, in front of the audience with my mic up." ...

"There's no signal in the Ed Sullivan Theater so they didn't tell me why, there was no rationale given, just that you'd been yanked."

He joked:

"I genuinely assumed it was your fault. I know you well enough to do that."

Separately Colbert described his own apprehension when he learned his own show was getting the axe, describing the conversation he had with his wife Evelyn:

“Evie said, ‘Are you going to tell your staff tomorrow?’ I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I will tell them after the summer break. Maybe I’ll tell them in September.’ She said, ‘You’re going to tell them tomorrow.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so. I just don’t think I’m up for it.’ And then she goes, ‘I am coming to work with you tomorrow because I think you are telling your staff.’”

“We get into the building. I go up in the elevator. I walk through the offices. By the time I get to my offices, I have sweat through my shirt. Because I didn’t want to know anything my staff didn’t know.”

“I was so nervous about doing it right. Because there was nothing on the prompter, I was doing it off the cuff. I f**ked up twice and I had to restart."

"And the audience thought it was a bit. They started going, ‘You can do it. Come on, Steve. You can do it.’ Because I always messed up on the sentence that told them what was happening."

"And then I got to the sentence that told them what was happening and they didn’t laugh. They didn’t laugh. That is it. So that’s how I did it.”

The crossover was a hit.

Stay tuned—Trump's bound to have lots to say about this.