Maggie Haberman Baffled by Trump’s Fixation on Kimmel Joke: ‘This Is Free Speech’ 

President Donald Trump continued his verbal broadsides against Jimmy Kimmel and ABC on Thursday, again demanding the network fire him over a joke he made last week, and even longtime Trump beat reporter Maggie Haberman is surprised by the president’s persistence.

On last Thursday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host performed a mock roast of Trump and the administration. At one point, he said, “Our First Lady, Melania, is here. Look at her, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”

The crack went largely unnoticed until a gunman tried to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday.

On Monday, the first lady issued a statement accusing Kimmel of “violent rhetoric” and said he should be off the air. The president soon followed and demanded ABC News fire him “immediately.”

Kimmel responded by telling the first lady that if she is concerned about violent rhetoric, she should have a talk with her husband.

On Thursday’s episode of The Lead on CNN, Haberman expressed puzzlement as to why the president is continuing to go after Kimmel.

“I can’t profess to understand exactly why they’re leaning in this hard on this,” she said. “Obviously, you saw that the first lady say something because she was partly what the joke was about. People don’t have to like every single joke. People can actually find jokes distasteful or find them unfunny or unfair or what have you. But this is free speech. And that is the essence of what Trump claimed to be fighting for in 2024 after saying that the censorious left had cracked down on conservatives too much. And now he is using the apparatus of government to go after a network over this joke.”

Watch above via CNN.

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