On Wednesday night, Jimmy Kimmel celebrated the 19th anniversary of his late-night program Jimmy Kimmel Live! by roasting former President Donald Trump.
“We learned today that Trump might be in the rough money-wise. According to a new story by Forbes—and you’re not gonna believe this—he may have exaggerated his wealth,” he said during his monologue.
As Kimmel explained, “In 2020, Forbes estimated that Trump had about $93 million in cash, which is interesting because as recently as 2015, he told Forbes he had $793 million in cash—which is probably just a rounding error of $700 million.” (Trump’s sharp decline in cash could of course be due to the pandemic, given that his constellation of properties must have been hit particularly hard.)
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But Trump, of course, has a long history of lying about his personal wealth—and was even caught on tape lying to a Forbes reporter in 1984 in order to crack the Forbes 400 billionaires’ list. At the time Trump, posing as an aide named “John Barron,” argued that he was a billionaire, even though his net worth at the time stood at $200 million.
For his part, Kimmel argued that there was no way a real billionaire would don a tuxedo to appear in a Pizza Hut commercial hawking their new Stuffed Crust Pizza. “I haven’t dug through his financials personally, but here’s the thing: A real billionaire doesn’t play a billionaire in a Pizza Hut commercial,” Kimmel joked, “in the same way the GEICO gecko isn’t really an insurance agent.”
