Donald Trump presented this year’s Kennedy Center honorees with their medals in an Oval Office ceremony on Saturday, but he also made some predictions of how the ceremony will do in the ratings and how he will do in hosting the event.
Namely, Trump said he would do better than Jimmy Kimmel, the late night host who has emceed multiple Oscar broadcasts.
“We have never had a president hosting the awards before. This is the first,” Trump told reporters.
“I’m sure they’ll give me great reviews, right? You know, they’ll say he was horrible. He was terrible. It was a horrible situation. No, we’ll do fine,” Trump said.
Trump then went on to say that he has “watched some of the people that host. Jimmy Kimmel was horrible, and some of these people. If I can’t beat out Jimmy Kimmel in terms of talent, then I don’t think I should be president.”
Kimmel has long directed his biting humor at Trump, and the president has taken to social media to slam the ABC host and call for his firing. In September, after Kimmel made a joke referencing the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, warned stations that carried the late-night show. Two major station groups, Nexstar and Sinclair, pulled the show, and ABC then took it off the schedule. But the network reinstated Kimmel the next week, after a backlash.
At the Oval Office ceremony, Trump also predicted that Sunday’s show, which will be taped to air later in the month on CBS, “will be the highest rated show they’ve ever done.”
“They’ve gotten some pretty good ratings, but there’s nothing like what’s going to happen tomorrow night.”
Trump skipped the Kennedy Center Honors during his first term, after some of the honorees in 2017 said that they would boycott a White House reception that typically precedes the ceremony.
But just weeks after returning to office this year, Trump fired all of Joe Biden’s appointees to the Kennedy Center board, ensuring that his own loyalists would dominate the arts institution’s governance. That also ensured that Trump would be elected chair of the board. The previous president, Deborah Rutter, was ousted, replaced by Ric Grenell, who served as acting director of national intelligence in the first Trump term.
Trump has said that he was “98% involved” in the selection of this year’s slate of honorees: Sylvester Stallone, George Strait, Gloria Gaynor, KISS and Michael Crawford. In August, Trump said that he “turned down plenty.” “They were too woke. I had a couple of wokesters,” he said. He blasted previous selections as including too many “radical left lunatics.”
Later on Saturday, the honorees will be feted by Trump and others at a State Department ceremony.
The ceremony has previously been hosted by figures ranging from Queen Latifah to Walter Cronkite, with the president remaining in the Kennedy Center Opera House’s presidential box.
In August, when Trump announced that he would host, he said, “I’ve been asked to host. I said, ‘I’m the president of the United States. Are you folls asking me to do that.’ ‘Sir, you’ll get much higher ratings.’ I said, ‘I don’t care. I’m the president of the United States. I won’t do it.’ They said, ‘Please.’ And then [chief of staff] Susie Wiles said, ‘Sir. I would like you to host.’ I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’”
