Donald Trump is obsessed with the Oscars.
The reality TV star turned president has been offering hyperbolic recaps of the ceremony—via Vine, Twitter, Instagram, and Fox & Friends—since 2012, the year after he attended it with wife Melania. Whether his Academy Awards animus has anything to do with his being disinvited from the event is anyone’s guess.
On Tuesday morning, the leader of the free world, having presumably holstered his Twitter finger the previous day, tweeted the following, “Lowest rated Oscars in HISTORY. Problem is, we don’t have Stars anymore - except your President (just kidding, of course)!”
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The social-media jab prompted Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel to respond in kind:
For the record, it was the lowest-rated Oscars telecast in history, with an average of 26.5 million viewers—down close to 20 percent from the previous year. But the dwindling ratings shouldn’t be on Kimmel but rather the lack of mainstream fare nominated for awards and the lack of drama, since all of the night’s big winners were foregone conclusions.
Anyway, Kimmel addressed the online fracas on his late-night show Tuesday night.
“I got a little surprise this morning. I woke up, I brushed my teeth, and I looked at my phone—I got a text saying, ‘Look at Trump’s Twitter account,’ as if I wasn’t going to do that anyway,” he said.
The comedian then put up Trump’s tweet for his studio audience.
“Of course he’s kidding! He’s not narcissistic,” cracked Kimmel. “Now, Trump loves saying the ratings are down to insinuate that’s a show of some kind of support for him, but the truth is, every year since Netflix happened, the ratings are down for every big TV show—the Super Bowl, Grammys, Emmys, Golden Globes—but Trump thinks he caused the ratings to go down. So, since I was the host of the Oscars, I felt like it was incumbent on me to respond.”
“I want to point out that my tweet got more than twice as many likes as his tweet,” he added.
But Kimmel wasn’t done.
“Trump always has a problem with the Academy Awards—which is surprising, because I really think he would love the Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a monster who has sex with a woman who can’t talk about it. Basically, it’s like his life story.”
