Jimmy Kimmel used a gym selfie and blonde jokes to mock White House press secretary Katie Zacharia, a double standard critics say the left would never tolerate against its own.
Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel spent his Monday monologue tearing into new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia, the 42-year-old former Newsmax commentator who had just stepped to the podium. He cast doubt on her qualifications, flashed a December 2024 gym mirror selfie, and reduced her résumé to hair color and a thumbs-up.
Daily Mail reporting detailed how Media Research Center analyst Alex Christy answered Tuesday with a Newsbusters piece and an X post that racked up nearly 500,000 views in hours, accusing Kimmel of the same sexist framing that drew swift outrage when another comedian aimed it more broadly.
Christy argued the left’s self-image as the party of women and Kimmel’s pose as a free-speech truth-teller collapse the moment the target is a conservative woman working for President Trump.
Kimmel opened by pretending to praise fairness, then undercut it at once.
"He's known for his fair and thoughtful, oh, wait. I'm just kidding. This is the new press secretary,"
He put up the gym photo of Zacharia in workout clothes and delivered the punch line as if the image itself proved emptiness.
"Former Newsmax commentator Katie Zacharia, seen here thinking,"
Then came the qualifications list.
"Katie met a number of qualifications for this job: She has blonde hair, she can do a thumbs up and... end of list, really."
He piled on with a Turning Point USA photo of Zacharia and Trump, both giving thumbs-up, and asked where “they” all get “that same face,” wondering aloud whether it was makeup or a machine. The monologue framed her first briefing, described as 14 minutes, as “the first day of kindergarten” and called her “Malibu Katie.”
Kimmel went further on the rotation of Trump press secretaries, name-checking predecessors Karoline Leavitt and Kayleigh McEnany in the same sarcastic breath.
"And in order to keep him awake and interested every six months they bring in a new fawning blonde dolt to add to the rotation."
He claimed even the short briefing achieved exactly what she was “brought in to do,” then mocked her attire as something suited to announcing pre-boarding on a Delta flight. A clip played in which she said she had wanted to work for Trump for a very long time; Kimmel treated that loyalty as the whole job description.
ABC, the network that still carries the show, was approached for comment along with the White House. No replies appeared in the coverage. That silence sits against years of larger fights over late-night politics and network choices, including earlier reporting that ABC set to pull the plug on Jimmy Kimmel Live after 24 seasons.
Christy, who tracks late-night comedy and cable news for the Media Research Center, did not treat the bit as harmless ribbing. He wrote that Kimmel put up the sports-bra-and-leggings gym selfie “and used it to suggest she’s dumb.” He then lined the monologue up against comedian Shane Gillis’s recent Saturday Night Live return.
A little more than two minutes into that SNL monologue, Gillis joked that he had not been to the gym in so long he “didn’t know women just dress like wh**es now.” Christy said the reaction to Gillis was swift and harsh, while Kimmel’s version, aimed at one specific woman on the other side of the aisle, slipped under the radar.
Even readers who shrug at Gillis or think he crossed a line, Christy argued, still have to face the parallel: Kimmel essentially told the same joke about appearance and gym clothes, only he locked it onto Zacharia by name and job. The watchdog group behind the critique, founded in 1987, runs Newsbusters as its arm for documenting liberal media bias; that project launched in 2005.
Christy also reached back to an older standard set inside Kimmel’s own shop. He cited Molly McNearney, Kimmel’s writer, producer, and wife, who once complained about pantsuit jokes aimed at Hillary Clinton.
"People were still making pantsuit jokes. I was like, 'What the f*** are you doing? You’re minimizing [Hillary Clinton] to her clothes?’ We’d never talk about a man’s outfit,"
That earlier lament, Christy noted, did not stop the Monday monologue from doing precisely that to a Republican press secretary. His closer framed the larger political habit in plain terms.
"Yet, the political movement that considers itself to be the party of women and Kimmel to be a free speech warrior who speaks truth to power cannot be bothered when the woman is on the opposite side of the aisle."
Zacharia’s first turn at the White House podium came Tuesday in the same news cycle. Kimmel’s material treated the short briefing and her navy skirt suit with gold buttons and white blouse as more proof of the caricature. The gym selfie dated to December 2024; the thumbs-up photo with Trump at a Turning Point USA event dated to December of last year. Both became props for the monologue rather than background.
None of this arrived in a vacuum. Late-night hosts still chase political applause, and networks still decide how much of it they will carry. Recent programming even put NYC Mayor Mamdani in a guest seat on Kimmel’s Brooklyn broadcast, another reminder that the show remains a stage for partisan theater when the booking fits.
Conservative audiences have watched the same pattern for years: appearance jokes and “dolt” labels travel freely when the woman works for Trump, then suddenly become disqualifying when the target is progressive. Christy’s X post forced that comparison into the open with hundreds of thousands of views before the news cycle moved on.
Media fights around the White House have sharpened for other reasons too. Trump has moved against outlets he says trafficked in false coverage, a dispute captured when Trump bans CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. Credential fights elsewhere show the same pressure over who gets a pass and who does not, including the push where the New York City Council moved to strip press passes from Mangione supporters posing as journalists.
Zacharia now holds one of the most visible communications jobs in government. Kimmel’s answer was to hold up a workout selfie, joke that she was “thinking,” and call her a fawning blonde stand-in. Christy’s answer was to ask why the rules about minimizing women to clothes apply only in one direction.
Feminism that expires at the party line is not a principle. It is a team jersey, and Monday’s monologue wore it openly.