Jimmy Kimmel and Sean Hannity have finally called a tenuous truce to the year's biggest feud
If you’re most people, having to apologize to Sean Hannity would make showering in Mar-a-Lago’s sewer water look like a pretty damn welcome Plan B. So it’s no surprise that Jimmy Kimmel, who is most people—it’s how he makes his living, after all—couldn’t bring himself on Sunday to admit that Hannity was right to call him out for making fun of Melania Trump’s Slovenian accent on Jimmy Kimmel Live! a week ago, launching the most puerile public spat of the year. Well, so far—and what the hey, it’s only April.
Instead, the Kimmel tweet that was supposed to wrap up the whole shindig only copped to modest culpability for tossing a raw steak into Hannity’s Fox News cage. “While I admit I did have fun with our back and forth, after some thought, I realize that the level of vitriol from all sides (mine and me included) does nothing good for anyone and, in fact, is harmful to our country,” Kimmel opined, and c’mon. Harmful to our country, really? We must be a much more fragile U.S.A. than anybody realized.
Because Hannity is no fool—he’s an idiot, but no fool—he knew better than to waste the reply the world was breathlessly waiting for by posting it on Twitter. “Just had this pop up. I’m at a tournament with my daughter. I’ll have a full and comprehensive response tomorrow on Hannity. 9 EST FOX,” he tweeted after getting a news alert about Kimmel’s olive branch. Translation: “If you think I’m done milking this, Kimmel, guess again.”
Last night, when he finally got around to the subject, Hannity sedately accepted Kimmel’s apology—which he both labeled “sincere” and a “forced Disney” apology, implying that his antagonist had sincerely buckled to corporate pressure. But he also put Kimmel on notice that he had video-clip ammo stockpiled to go back on the warpath “if you want to start this up again,” leaving himself as the arbiter of what “starting up again” means. The suggestion that Kimmel was now on probation turned Hannity into what he’s always wanted to be: law enforcement.
Weirdly enough, Melania Trump’s the only player in this whole spectacle who came out with her dignity intact.
At the same time, he took care to sound like the magnanimous grown-up in the room. His best stroke was inviting Kimmel to come onto his show and talk politics: “I promise no name-calling, no anger, no rehashing of the Twitter fight.” Kimmel’s producers must have been kicking themselves for not thinking of that idea first, since whoever appears on the other man’s turf will automatically be perceived as the penitent one. But Kimmel will look like a sorehead if he says no, and Hannity is unlikely to let him forget it. You had to wonder how on earth a smart Everyman like Jimmy Kimmel had ended up giving Sean Hannity, who drinks rabies juice for breakfast, the upper hand.
In case you somehow let your attention wander last week to more trivial things, like North Korea’s nukes or Trump’s snap announcement that his magic border wall will be made out of National Guardsmen, all this started when Kimmel played a clip of Melania reading a children’s book aloud during the White House Easter egg hunt and mocked her pronunciation of “This and that” as “Dees and dat.” Inevitably, Hannity pounced, letting his audience know that “liberal Jimmy Kimmel” was a “despicable disgrace” and an “ass clown” who didn’t even realize English is the First Lady’s fifth language.
That was the civilized part. Seizing on Hannity’s “ass clown” remark, Kimmel fired back on his own show: “You’re the whole ass circus.” Then he took to Twitter to malign Hannity’s sexuality by imagining POTUS as his bedmate. “When your clown makeup rubs off on Trump’s ass, does it make his butt look like a Creamsicle?” was followed by “Don’t worry—just keep tweeting—you’ll get back on top! (or does Trump prefer you on bottom?)”
The Daily Beast’s Ira Madison rightly branded those tweets “homophobic,” probably hastening Kimmel’s decision to bag the whole thing. Driving Sean Hannity nuts is a deli of delights, but alienating the LGBT community—to whom Kimmel did apologize on Sunday—messes up his current brand. Nonetheless, drive Hannity nuts he did. Fox’s top cop dug up sexually suggestive comedy bits involving 18-year-old women from Kimmel’s Man Show days, with Hannity calling him “a sick, twisted, creepy, perverted weirdo” and inventing the sobriquet “Harvey Weinstein Jr.” for good measure.
As Michelle Obama so famously didn’t say, “When they go low, let’s race ‘em to the gutter.” After Hannity asked whether Kimmel would have let his own daughter participate in those Man Show bits, Kimmel retaliated with, “Would you want your daughter being ‘grabbed by the pussy’?” (For the record, Hannity’s daughter is around 15 years old.) That was after he’d dragged Stormy Daniels into the brawl: “You know what I think is disrespectful to the First Lady? Cheating on her with a porn star after she has a baby. Why don’t you rant a little about that, Sean Hannity?”
If that had been his first and only response to Hannity when the brouhaha brewed up, Kimmel might have gotten away with a clean win. Just because Hannity wouldn’t let it go—“Apologize to the First Lady, and I’ll stop. If not, I will NEVER stop. EVER!” he tweeted on Friday night, to universal groans—that didn’t mean Kimmel had to keep goading him. But he did, and that’s how both men ended up looking like—gee, what’s the elegant phrase we’re looking for?—ass clowns.
Still, Hannity is the one whose reputation won’t suffer. How can it? In one way or another, he’s been peddling this unhinged act since 1996, and his run-amok denunciations are what his viewers dote on. Kimmel, on the other hand, has probably blown a lot of the good-guy cred he’s enjoyed since his monologue about his infant son’s heart surgery last year turned the “Kimmel Test” into a byword for compassionate health-care policies. Not only did he revert to his sophomoric Man Show mode, but he was amazingly tin-eared about how crass his smug taunts sounded. And for what—to make Sean Hannity angry? How redundant can you get?
On top of that, no matter how overblown his outrage was, Hannity was—brace yourselves—right. Yup, kids: Mocking any American citizen’s foreign accent really does amount to mocking immigrants, even if Hannity’s dudgeon only applies to the white-skinned ones. Besides, Melania Trump, whatever her sins may be, is a painfully shy woman who never wanted to be FLOTUS. She plainly dreads her rare public appearances in part because she’s afraid she’ll be ridiculed, exactly as Kimmel did. Weirdly enough, she’s the only player in this whole spectacle who came out with her dignity intact, and she did it—as usual—by not saying a word, including calling anyone names. Her husband does enough of that for both of them.