Late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel compared President Donald Trump‘s feud with Rosie O’Donnell to one of the greatest of this age: his own with one Matthew Paige Damon. Whoa.
“This feud with Rosie’s been going longer than me and Matt Damon now,” he joked at the top of Wednesday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!.
See the moment below at about two minutes in.
He made the quip after showing footage of Trump with Micheál Martin, the prime minister of Ireland, at the White House. When the press was allowed to ask questions, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) reporter boyfriend, Brian Glenn, asked Martin a question that he must have known Trump would love: Ireland is known for being fun-loving, so how could Martin allow former actress and talk show host O’Donnell to move to the country?
“That’s true,” Trump said in response. “Thank you, I like that question.”
Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.
Trump then asked Martin if he knew O’Donnell or that she’d gone to the country. Then he declared, “You’re better off not knowing.”
Trump and O’Donnell have had a rivalry since the 2000s, when she was a cohost of The View and he was the host of reality show The Apprentice. They’ve regularly argued on social media, and she revealed this week that she moved to Ireland ahead of his inauguration because she disagrees with his policies. She said she will consider coming back “when it is safe for all citizens to have equal rights there in America.”
The feud between Kimmel and Damon, meanwhile, is completely fake but truly entertaining. It started when Kimmel began ending his underdog show, which first aired in 2003, with an apology to the A-lister at the end of each episode. “I want to apologize to Matt Damon,” Kimmel would say. “We ran out of time.” The joke took off and has resulted in some quality content. Remember when Kimmel’s comedian former girlfriend Sarah Silverman sang “I’m F—ing Matt Damon?”
The two even continued the gag in August 2023 when Kimmel explained that Damon and a famous friend had offered to pay his staff when writers went on strike. “Ben Affleck and the despicable Matt Damon contacted me and offered to pay our staff for two weeks,” Kimmel said then. “A week each, they wanted to pay out of their own pockets our staff.”
After showing the clip of Trump’s interaction with the far-right Real America’s Voice network’s reporter, Kimmel said that if stupid questions were going to be allowed at the White House, he wanted to be invited to ask some.