Actor George Clooney defended late-night host Jimmy Kimmel on Monday as the comedian faces backlash over describing first lady Melania Trump as an “expectant widow.”
“Jimmy’s a comedian, and I would argue that Karoline Leavitt didn’t mean shots should be fired,” Clooney said at the 51st Chaplin Award Gala, according to Variety. “She was making a joke. Fair enough. You look at that side and go, ’Well, jokes are jokes.’ But the rhetoric is a little dangerous. And we’ve seen it a lot lately.”
Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in an interview before the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) Dinner that there would be “shots fired” in the president’s speech at the event, referring to his likely verbal jabs at the press.
“When one side is calling anyone they disagree with traitors to the country, which is a charge that’s punishable by death, just because they don’t agree with someone, I think the rhetoric is a little too heated,” Clooney said.
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Kimmel defended his joke about the first lady during his show on Monday.
“This was Thursday, and there was no big reaction to it until this morning, when I greeted the day facing yet another Twitter vomit storm,” Kimmel said during his monologue. “I said, our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at her. So beautiful. This is from the glow. Like an expectant widow, which obviously was a joke about their age difference and the look of joy we see on her face every time they were together.”
“It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80, and she’s younger than I am. It was not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination — and they know that,” he continued. “I’ve been very vocal for many years speaking out against gun violence in particular, but I understand that the first lady had a stressful experience over the weekend, and probably every weekend is pretty stressful in that house.”
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Clooney also decried political violence at the gala.
“I can’t be here on a night like tonight and just ignore everything that’s going on in the world,” Clooney said, speaking on stage, according to Variety.
“I disagree with everything that this administration stands for, but there’s no place for the kind of violence we saw two nights ago in Washington, D.C. Nor is there room for this kind of violence in Minnesota with Alex Pretti or Renée Good,” he added.
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“It seems to me there’s a struggle that has to be won against hatred and corruption and cruelty and violence,” Clooney continued, according to the report. “It’s a struggle for the very soul of this republic because to foment hate and violence is to inherit the wind.”
Clooney is an outspoken critic of the president, recently arguing that a threat Trump issued to Iran on social media was a “war crime.”
