Jimmy Kimmel Crashed Trump’s 80th Birthday Party with the One Name the President Hates To be Associated with The Most
Donald Trump turned 80 on Sunday and probably expected the day to go like any other milestone birthday for a sitting president: some fanfare, a little celebration, and at least a few hours free from ridicule. Jimmy Kimmel had other plans. The late-night host showed up to the party uninvited, gift in hand, and that gift was a pointed reminder about Jeffrey Epstein.
Kimmel posted a satirical birthday card to his Instagram on June 14th that was designed to mirror a cryptic note Trump allegedly wrote to the convicted sex offender for his 50th birthday back in 2003.
The original card, which the Wall Street Journal first reported on in July 2025, was reportedly written inside the hand-drawn outline of a slender naked woman. Kimmel swapped that silhouette out for something entirely different: a crude but unmistakable drawing of a heavyset man’s torso, complete with what observers widely recognized as a jab at the president’s figure.
And the message inside? Pure callback. “Happy 80th, Donald! A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
What Was Actually in That Original Card?
The alleged Trump-to-Epstein card is worth understanding in full because Kimmel was not just making up a punch line. According to the Wall Street Journal’s reporting, later picked up after Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released the document publicly in September 2025, the card was structured as a dialogue between two named characters: Donald and Jeffrey.
A “Voice Over” line opens with the phrase, “There must be more to life than having everything.” Donald responds, “Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.” The dialogue continues with Donald noting that he and Jeffrey share “certain things in common,” before adding, “Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?” Jeffrey’s reply: “As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.”
The card closes with Donald signing off, “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday and may every day be another wonderful secret,” followed by the signature “Donald J. Trump.”
Those specific phrases are the ones Kimmel pulled from and used in his birthday post, making his Instagram card a near-word-for-word callback to what allegedly started as a private message between two powerful men more than two decades ago. That is the context that makes the whole thing land differently than a standard late-night joke.
Trump Has Been Fighting This Story for Almost a Year
The White House has pushed back hard on the original card since it surfaced. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X in September, writing that it was “very clear President Trump did not draw this picture, and he did not sign it,” adding that his legal team would “continue to aggressively pursue litigation.”
Trump himself told the Wall Street Journal in July that the card was “a fake thing,” and stated plainly: “I never wrote picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women. It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”
Trump responded by filing a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Journal and two of its reporters in July 2025. A federal judge dismissed that suit in April 2026. Trump refiled the lawsuit the following month, this time expanding the complaint to include the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones, Rupert Murdoch, and News Corp CEO Robert Thomson.
As of now, the Journal has filed a motion seeking dismissal of the revised lawsuit.
Kimmel, for his part, has been pulling on this particular thread for months. Earlier this year, after First Lady Melania Trump told reporters she had never been friends with Epstein, Kimmel broadcast a photograph on his show of Donald and Melania posing together with Epstein, asking on air, “Any particular reason he had a picture of you guys on display at his house?”
The Bigger Picture Behind the Birthday Joke
The Epstein angle is not just late-night material at this point. While running for president in 2024, Trump promised to release the Department of Justice files related to Epstein, but after winning the election, he allegedly tried to block that release.
He is mentioned thousands of times in the files released so far, and Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland has said that searching Trump’s name in the unredacted files available to lawmakers returned more than 1 million results.
Kimmel has since proposed calling the files the “Trump-Epstein Files” rather than just the “Epstein Files,” given how frequently Trump’s name appears in them.
Meanwhile, Trump’s birthday fell on the same day as a UFC fight he hosted on the White House South Lawn, tied to his administration’s Freedom 250 celebration for the nation’s semiquincentennial. Trump has recently demanded ABC fire Kimmel from his post at “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” again, continuing a running feud between the two.
So What Happens Now?
None of this is going away quietly. With Trump’s refiled lawsuit still active, the Epstein card controversy remains in active legal territory, and Kimmel has shown no signs of backing off from the subject.
A ten-foot-tall mockup of the alleged Trump-to-Epstein card even appeared overnight on the National Mall near the U.S. Capitol this year, placed there by left-leaning organizations highlighting Trump’s past ties to Epstein.
When a late-night joke, a $10 billion lawsuit, congressional investigations, and a National Mall installation all point to the same document, that document tends to stick around. And if Kimmel’s track record is any indication, he will be there for his next birthday, 81, with another card ready to go.
