Jimmy Kimmel used his latest Jimmy Kimmel Live monologue to skewer Donald Trump’s behavior at the G7 summit in France and turn the president’s Iran peace deal into a punch line. Kimmel said Trump was throwing his weight around, arrived 45 minutes late to meet world leaders and greeted them with, “Hello, I’m the boss.”
The monologue landed because it tied Trump’s foreign-policy talk to the sort of late-night ridicule that tends to travel fastest when he is already dominating the news. Kimmel said Trump’s behavior at the summit was “increasingly childish each time he goes,” then moved straight to the Iran deal, which Trump had described as a “very strong deal … nobody knows what it is, but it’s very strong.”
Kimmel’s version of that deal was brutal. He said it gave Tehran the power to shut down the strait of Hormuz any time it wanted and joked, “Dagnabbit, we got Hormuzled!” He also said Trump had “given Iran full control of the strait of Hormuz” and thrown in “a minimum of $300bn,” a line that drew its bite from the scale of the claim as much as from the insult. In Kimmel’s telling, the deal was not a diplomatic breakthrough but a giveaway dressed up as strength.
That is where the friction sits. Trump called the agreement “very strong,” yet Kimmel and Republicans have described it as a foreign-policy blunder that left Iran with leverage over one of the world’s most sensitive waterways. Kimmel sharpened that point by saying, “Just to recap: we killed the ayatollah and replaced him with a younger, more radical ayatollah,” before adding, “We did nothing for the protesters in Iran” and “We used up who knows how many billions of dollars on bombs and missiles.”
He then pushed the joke into Melania Trump territory, saying, “Right now, Melania’s wondering, ‘How do I get a deal like that?’” The line worked because it turned the argument from geopolitics into a marital punch line, while still making the same point: Kimmel sees Trump as a politician who sells weakness as strength. He closed by saying, “It just goes to show you: there’s no problem that Trump can’t make worse.”
The other late-night jab came from Seth Meyers on Late Night, where he mocked Trump’s remark that “war is a nasty place. I see it. I see it maybe better than anyone has seen it,” adding that soldiers might have a different view and that they do not mean war “in 4K.” But Kimmel’s monologue had the sharper edge, especially when he said the fighting had helped push attention away from the Trump-Epstein files — and that once the war is really over, “we will get right back into that.”
What Kimmel left hanging is the same question Trump keeps inviting: if the deal was so strong, why did it hand Tehran the ability to close the strait of Hormuz at will? Until that is answered in plain terms, the joke is not just that Trump was mocked on television. It is that the punch line still sounds closer to the policy than the explanation.
