💬 Why I'm NOT calling for Kimmel to be fired, and the Florida Man announcement

It was quite a week here at The Rubin Report — we had the big Florida Man announcement, a bonanza of pop culture references, news cycle craziness. Oh, and there was another assassination attempt on Trump. Weird how we’ve almost come to expect crazy leftists will regularly try to take Trump’s life. More about that in Sunday’s newsletter.

This week, I have to admit, I was a little counterintuitive on the show. Call me Counterintuitive Dave, if you must.

I said some things that maybe you didn’t expect (I saw the YouTube comments 👀) when it comes to two of America’s most loathsome individuals. You know who I’m talking about: Jimmy Kimmel and James Comey.

I know a lot of people on the right, including many who are usually on the side of free speech, are calling for Jimmy Kimmel to be fired for a joke he told a couple of days before the latest assassination attempt. I know Donald and Melania Trump are calling for him to be fired. But, I Dave Rubin, am not calling for Jimmy Kimmel to be fired over a joke. 😱 That said, he should be fired for being an unfunny “comedian.”

Why? I don't think the government should force ABC to fire him. That would be a violation of the First Amendment. And I understand Donald and Melania Trump have First Amendment rights, too, which they exercised this week. But it would set a bad precedent if ABC acquiesced to pressure from the federal government over a single bad joke.

Important to note: I still think Jimmy Kimmel is the world champion of leftist clowns on TV. And I also think that if ABC examined his record of alienating half the country, or more — with his “jokes” about Charlie Kirk, Markwayne Mullin, people who didn’t get the Covid vaccine, the list goes on — and determined that his leftwing lunacy wasn’t good for business and canceled his show (like CBS did with Colbert), I’d be A-OK with that. In fact, I’d feel pretty good about it. And, btw, the joke was completely unfunny. Kimmel stopped doing comedy long ago.

And I get that Kimmel benefits from a double standard. Roseanne Barr, a good friend of mine, was fired by ABC in 2017 — when she had the top-rated TV show in the country — for a single tweet. But just because Roseanne was fired, even though she shouldn’t have been, doesn’t mean Kimmel should automatically be fired, too. Life comes at you fast, Jimmy. One minute you’re hosting an imaginary version of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the next minute you’re explaining to the Secret Service why your joke wasn’t a crime.

Which is a perfect segue into James Comey. I devoted an entire Sunday newsletter a few weeks back to what an abnormal figure in American politics James Comey is. In fact, in that newsletter I mentioned his “86 47” Instagram post and what a weird thing that was for a former FBI director to have done. This week, a federal grand jury indicted Comey over that post, finding that he “knowingly and willfully made a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States.”

Here’s where I become counterintuitive Dave again. As despicable and weird as I think James Comey is, I don’t love the idea of indicting him over a social media post, and I like even less the idea of him going to jail for it. It’s messy.

For instance: Is James Comey lying that he didn’t know how the “86 47” would be interpreted? Absolutely. There’s no way a grown adult, let alone the former director of the FBI, is unable to make that connection. But was his intent to actually call for the assassination of President Trump? The answer to that one is not so open-and-shut, even if we can all agree he most definitely knew how the numbers would be interpreted and that it’s likely he arranged the shells that way himself.

I say all of this fully acknowledging that if the characters were reversed here, and it had been a former high-ranking government official who was a Republican who did something like that while a Democrat was in office, well, we know how that would play out. I’m sure Comey’s defense will be that he deleted the photo faster than Hillary Clinton deleted her email servers, and that he thought the waves on the beach that day were doing political commentary, and it was just a funny thing to post.

The great irony of all of this is that Donald Trump is a funnier comedian than Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert and many of these other leftist former “comedians” who may have been funny at one point, but are now just anti-Trump operatives. And funnier than the James Comeys of the world, who think they’re so clever among their Deep State friends. See the Tweet of the Week below for evidence.

But first, as you know, The View is just a hot mess of insanity and I’ve been running out of ways to illustrate just how absurd the show has become. This week, I went out on a limb and used the cast of characters from, He-Man, one of my favorite ‘80s cartoon series, to make sense of the abject insanity that ABC likes to refer to as a daytime talk show.

You can watch that breakdown here. And then, last week’s poll results, and your chance to see a live version of The Rubin Report in Miami and more. Scroll down.

Rubio continues domination of Trump admin power rankings

I know we had a three-way tie a couple weeks ago, but Marco Rubio is continuing his domination of the Top Trump Peeps poll. In fact, Rubio has won it every time I’ve run the poll this calendar year, sometimes lapping everyone else. You have to go back to the poll in the newsletter I sent on Dec. 5, 2025, for the last time Rubio didn’t win. Incidentally, Hegseth won that one and he was the runner up in last week’s poll, as you can see above. And Rubio won the poll prior to that one, so he’s on about a six-month run of dominance at this point.

Not sure what any of that means as we march toward 2028, but people are clearly happy with Rubio and Hegseth, and as I said on the show this week, I could get behind a Hegseth White House bid if that’s what he decides to do in ‘28. No one ever talks about him running for president. I thought reader jancurtis had an interesting take on 2028 implications, and synhome1 I suspect speaks for many of you

Switching things up for this week’s poll — earlier this year I asked you who the worst leftist clown on TV was. Kimmel won that poll pretty easily, with Sunny Hostin finishing in second. This week, I’m asking the inverse. I know TV has become kind of quaint at this point, but who’s your favorite? And yes — there are a couple of CNN personalities on the list. ⬇️

• 📣 Big announcement this week 📣 We are putting on a live “Florida Man” edition of The Rubin Report that you can attend in-person at the Fillmore theater in Miami Beach on June 11 with Gov. Ron DeSantis. If you’re not in Florida, there’s plenty of time to plan a trip. And there will be special guests! Ben Shapiro and Jillian Michaels will also be appearing, and Adam Corolla will be doing standup. Talk about an all-star lineup.

 ✅ This is a one-night-only event

 ✅ Doors open at 6:45 p.m., show starts at 7:30 p.m.

 ✅ There are rumors that I will be giving out two-second hugs before the show starts

 ✅ Don’t miss it. Go here to get tickets

 ✅ Seating is limited and the event is expected to sell out, so don’t wait to get tickets

• Tuesday is Cinco de Mayo. Oh, you need the smoothest reposado with notes of vanilla, oak and hibuscus to help celebrate? Well, I can help. Pick up up a bottle — or three — of Copal online. Place an order here. Even if it doesn’t get there by Tuesday, I promise you’ll enjoy it 🥃

• Make sure you’re listening to First Look, my new morning news roundup. It’s a short news briefing in podcast form that gives you an overview of the headlines as you start your day. You can find it on Spotify, Rumble, and YouTube. And check out the news portion of my website, where I’ve got the Rubin Report staff keeping tabs on the news I think you should be paying attention to.

• You did it! You’ve reached the end of the newsletter. That’s all for now, but I’ll be back on Sunday with a new edition of The Return to Normalcy.

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Until Sunday … — Dave