Jimmy Fallon kicked off The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Monday, June 25, with a question for President Donald Trump: “Why are you tweeting at me?”
“As you may have heard last night, the president of the United States went after me on Twitter. So, Melania, if you’re watching, I don’t think your anti-bullying campaign is working,” the late-night host, 43, said during his opening monologue.
“When I saw that Trump insulted me on Twitter, I was going to tweet back immediately, but I thought, ‘I have more important things to do,’” he continued. “And then I thought, ‘Wait, shouldn’t he have more important things to do? … What are you doing? You’re the president!’”
Trump, 72, told Fallon to “be a man” in a tweet posted late Sunday, June 24. “@jimmyfallon is now whimpering to all that he did the famous ‘hair show’ with me (where he seriously messed up my hair), & that he would have now done it differently because it is said to have ‘humanized’ me,” the commander in chief wrote, referencing the 2016 TV interview in which Fallon tousled Trump’s distinctive combover. “He is taking heat. He called & said ‘monster ratings.’”
After reading the tweet aloud to his audience on Monday night, the Saturday Night Live alum joked that the former Celebrity Apprentice host’s attack is “pretty much the only thing I have in common with NFL players.” (In September 2017, Trump called on the football league to fire athletes who kneel during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and racial inequality.)
Fallon initially responded to Trump’s tweet by making a donation to the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) in the president’s name. The comedian joked on Monday, “When Trump heard that, he was like, ‘I love RAICES! They’re my favorite peanut butter cup. There’s no wrong way to eat a RAICES.’”
Fallon later quipped that Trump found time to write a Yelp review after White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was recently asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia because of her work with the administration. He added, “Turns out her server asked her what she wanted as an appetizer, and out of habit she refused to answer.”
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon airs on NBC weeknights at 11:35 p.m. ET.
