Jimmy Kimmel might be the next American comedian to flee to Europe to escape President Donald Trump.
Kimmel, who has hosted the ABC late-night comedy show Jimmy Kimmel Live! for 22 years, shared his thoughts on Trump and the state of American politics with his ex-girlfriend, Sarah Silverman, on her podcast.
“A lot of people I know are thinking about where are they going to get citizenship?” Silverman said.
“I did get Italian citizenship,” Kimmel replied.
According to the Italian news agency Ansa, Kimmel obtained Italian citizenship this year after proving his ancestral lineage. Kimmel’s maternal great-grandparents emmigrated to New York from Naples after an earthquake devastated their hometown, Ischia, in 1883.
“What’s going on is as bad as you thought it was gonna be,” Kimmel remarked to Silverman, referring to Trump’s second term.
“Way worse,” Silverman chimed in.
“It’s so much worse; it’s just unbelievable,” Kimmel agreed. “I feel like it’s probably even worse than he would like it to be.”
In obtaining Italian citizenship, Kimmel joins other celebrities who have taken steps to flee the country or have already done so, including Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres, who fled to Ireland and England, respectively.
Kimmel is a public critic of MAGA and has regularly criticized Trump, most recently over the president’s trade war. After a hiccup in the stock market, Kimmel accused Trump of causing stress on the stock market to “distract us from all the other horrible stuff.”
He later joined the chorus of TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) jokes—a nickname Wall Street executives have given Trump for his flip-flopping on tariffs. “How does it feel to be on the other end of the nickname game?” Kimmel said on his show, “Not great, does it?”
Kimmel has also coined his own nicknames for Donald and Melania Trump: Don Valjean and Lady Misérable.
In late June, Trump celebrated CBS’ decision to cancel Stephen Colbert’s show, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, and warned Kimmel that he was next on the chopping block.
“Next up will be an even less talented Jimmy Kimmel, and then, a weak, and very insecure, Jimmy Fallon. The only real question is, who will go first?” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
Kimmel fired back with an Instagram post referencing Trump’s friendship with convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
“I’m hearing you’re next. Or maybe it’s just another wonderful secret,” Kimmel wrote, a reference to a line in a letter to Epstein that Trump has denied writing that expresses hope that “every day be another wonderful secret.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Kimmel’s team for comment.
Fellow comedians O’Donnell and DeGeneres fled for greener pastures after learning that Trump had won the election in 2024. O’Donnell has been engaged in multiple spats with the president and told CNN, “I knew after reading Project 2025 that if Trump got in, it was time for me and my non-binary child to leave the country.”
“We got here the day before the election and woke up to lots of texts from our friends with crying emojis,” DeGeneres told broadcaster Richard Bacon, according to BBC. “And we’re like, ‘We’re staying here.’”
