Jimmy Kimmel marked President Donald Trump's 80th birthday on Sunday with a message straight from a greeting card. Allegedly.
Kimmel mimicked a birthday message Trump supposedly wrote for Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003. According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump doodled the outline of a naked woman and wrote an enigmatic message inside. “A pal is a wonderful thing,” it read in part. “Happy Birthday ― and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump has denied writing the message and sued the Journal over the report.
But on Sunday, Kimmel created his own doodle with a silhouette mocking the president's physique and posted it on Instagram.
Kimmel, via his show's opening monologue, offers near-nightly reminders of the president's ties to Epstein, the late sex trafficker who was once close friends with Trump.
“I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York Magazine in 2002. “He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
They reportedly fell out over a real estate deal in 2004. While running for president in 2024, Trump promised to release the Department of Justice's files related to Epstein, but then tried to block that release after he was elected. He's mentioned thousands of times in the files that have been released so far, and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said a search for Trump's name in the unredacted files that lawmakers have access to returned “more than a million results.”
Kimmel has proposed calling those files the “Trump-Epstein Files” rather than just the Epstein files because his name came up so often. Trump has repeatedly attacked Kimmel and called for ABC to fire him, as he's done for other late-night hosts who make jokes about him.
