Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel blasted Vice President JD Vance for defending Donald Trump after the president posted an AI-generated image online which portrayed him as Jesus.
Trump shared the image on Truth Social Sunday after dubbing Pope Leo XIV as “WEAK” on crime, following the pontiff’s criticism of the U.S. war with Iran. The AI image showed Trump wearing robes and healing a sick man with beams of light coming from his hands.
The post received fierce backlash from Christians and political figures on both sides of the aisle. Trump took the image down Monday, claiming that he thought it had portrayed him as a doctor, not Jesus.
Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, subsequently claimed the image was “a joke” during an interview with Fox News’ Bret BaierMonday. But Kimmel was having none of the excuses.
“Trump is doing his best to upset every faction of Christianity,” the Jimmy Kimmel Live! host said Tuesday. “After he lambasted the pope, he posted an image of himself as Jesus, and then when everyone got mad, he said, ‘Oh I didn’t know that was Jesus, I thought that was me as a doctor healing people,’ which is so lame. Not one person believes it. It is quite clearly an image of Jesus with his dumb head on it.”
Kimmel noted that not even Vance was “able to go along with this doctor storyline,” and was forced to come up with an entirely different narrative.
The late-night host then played a clip of Vance on Fox News.
“I think the president was posting a joke, and of course he took it down because he recognized that a lot of people weren’t understanding his humor in that case,” the vice president claimed.
Kimmel then said: “He was posting a joke, you understand? And like all the best jokes, it had to be explained and then deleted. First, he was Jesus. Then he wasn’t Jesus, he was a doctor. And now, it was a joke.”
He added: “Why did I get kicked off the air again? I can’t remember.”
Kimmel’s show was suspended in September over comments he made about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was shot and killed during a live debate on a Utah college campus.
During the show, Kimmel said that the MAGA world was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
ABC brought Jimmy Kimmel Live! back on air the following week.
Meanwhile, Trump seems unfazed by the Jesus image furor. On Wednesday, the president shared another image on Truth Social that showed Jesus giving him a hug.
The new image, which appeared to be AI-generated, shows Jesus with an arm around Trump’s shoulder and one hand on his chest. The two are standing in front of a halo of light and an American flag, and have their heads leaning against each other.
Trump captioned the image: “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!! President DJT.”
