Late night host Jimmy Kimmel has ridiculed Donald Trump for posting a macho meme brandishing an assault rifle and wearing sunglasses, saying he looked like a “fat John Wick.”
The image the president posted in the early hours of Wednesday morning featured Trump in hit man guise posing in front of a bomb-struck Middle Eastern hillside backdrop with the slogan: “No more Mr Nice Guy!”
An accompanying caption read: “Iran can’t get their act together. They don’t know how to sign a nonnuclear deal. They better get smart soon!”
On the following evening’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the comic urged White House staffers to lock Trump out of his phone and derided the president for believing a meme might frighten Iran’s theocratic leaders into hurriedly agreeing a peace deal to end the military stalemate between the two nations.
“He posted this at 4:05 a.m.,” Kimmel pointed out in his opening monologue. “So much for toning down the rhetoric, I guess. Can we maybe get him one of those bricks that locks him out of his phone between the hours of midnight and six? Maybe one of those Yondr pouches they have at concerts?
“How are the Iranians supposed to react to this? Is this supposed to scare them? Best case scenario, they go, ‘OK, you know what? The old man has lost his marbles. He can’t sleep. He’s cosplaying as fat John Wick. I think we need to call his kids to make sure he’s OK.’”
He continued: “Does he really think this image will strike fear into the beards of those hardcore religious zealots running around?
“After two months of being bombed, they’re going to open their laptops and they’re going to look and go: ‘Mojtaba! Get in here! This time he means business!’ He looks like Rambo and Dumbo at the same time.”
The mockery marks the latest escalation of Kimmel’s long-running feud with the Trump administration, which sparked back into life in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.
It emerged that Kimmel had joked prior to the event that first lady Melania Trump had the “glow of an expectant widow,” which took on an unfortunate resonance after a gunman made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president for a third time.
The Trumps lashed out at Kimmel and called for his firing by ABC but the comic defended himself by saying that the gag had been about their age difference and was not a call for political violence, suggesting the first lady look to her husband if she was concerned about partisan rhetoric stoking division.
Trump’s Federal Communications Commission has since told the network it must renew its broadcast licenses early, saying it had received a complaint from the National Religious Broadcasters association over Kimmel’s quip.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation told The Independent the FCC’s actions amounted to an “attack on the First Amendment.”
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