ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel has landed on a fresh nickname for President Donald Trump, and it rests entirely on how often the president has been caught dozing in public. A longtime Trump nemesis, the comedian used his monologue on Tuesday, September 15, 2026, to needle the 80-year-old president for appearing to drift off at the September 11 memorial ceremony, held on the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
His coinage: “Teddy Doze-evelt.”
“At the event, Teddy Doze-evelt got in a pretty good nap,” Kimmel said, telling viewers afterward that the White House had denied the president fell asleep. No such statement has been published by the White House or matched to a briefing.
“They said he was just ‘solemnly listening,’” Kimmel continued. “Which is the same kind of ‘solemnly listening’ Melania does when he tries to crawl in bed with her.”
A Montage of Public Catnaps
To back the bit, the host rolled a montage of clips running close to a minute, every frame of it Trump with his eyes shut: his swearing-in in 2025, the Fourth of July fireworks display, the third game of the NBA Finals, Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery, the funeral for Pope Francis, the funeral for Sen. Lindsey Graham in July, a string of Cabinet meetings, and the September 11 memorials this year and last.
From there, Kimmel turned the joke into a charge of hypocrisy, reminding the audience that Trump spent years going after former President Joe Biden’s age and alertness with the label “Sleepy Joe.”
Trump has offered an explanation of his own for the closed eyes. In January he denied having been asleep at earlier Cabinet meetings, saying he shut them because the sessions were “pretty boring.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has his own nickname for the president — “Dozy Don” — jabbed at the Arlington appearance on social media.
A Compliment With a Catch
Kimmel did pay Trump one compliment, though it arrived with a catch. “Compared to Mitch McConnell, Trump has more energy than Kevin Hart,” he joked, then cued footage of the 84-year-old senator looking dazed as he returned to the job in a wheelchair after upwards of three months away.
The Kennedy Center Standoff
The nickname was not the only target. The following night, Wednesday, September 16, Kimmel turned his attention to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., where the board of trustees had voted a day earlier to close the main building immediately for two years of renovations, with a reopening projected for 2028. His proposal: rename it for First Lady Melania Trump.
Minutes before that vote, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper had ruled that the president’s name could not be added to the building or its grounds without congressional approval. “Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Cooper wrote in the ruling. The specific wording the judge blocked was the phrase “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump” on the building’s exterior.
Trump then said the reconstruction “will not take place” unless the Supreme Court overturned the decision. In a Truth Social post on Tuesday, September 15, he said he was closing the Kennedy Center “for safety reasons,” and set a condition on the work: “The Renovation and Reconstruction, which is a very large and complex job, cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name.” A $100 million fundraising campaign has been reported, while other outlets put the renovation itself at $257 million.
The arts center has been one of the fixations of Trump’s second term. He installed himself as chairman after returning to office in 2025 and put his name on the building. A federal judge barred him in May from keeping it there, inside or outside, and workers quickly stripped “Donald J. Trump” from the facade.
A reporter in Charlotte, N.C., pressed the president on Wednesday, September 16, about why the naming matters so much. Trump called the center a mess and a financial loser, saying it had lost tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of dollars. If his administration takes the center on long-term, or raises the money to keep it running, he argued, it deserves recognition. Without that, he said, the complex will close and end up ripped down, in what he described as very dangerous shape.
The same September 16 monologue also carried a doctored version of Second Lady Usha Vance’s National Diaper Bank Network ad, the edited Usha saying: “No one wants to be around a messy baby or a poopy president.” Kimmel additionally mocked Trump’s pledge to give $5,000 to every adult American if Republicans hold the Senate and House in the November midterms. “He’s trying every trick to try to steal [the election] himself,” the host said.
Maria Shriver, President John F. Kennedy’s niece, went after Trump over the naming fight on X earlier that week. “This statement from Trump blows my mind,” she wrote, adding: “Imagine spending your time and your days focused on this, as everyday Americans struggle with healthcare, gas prices, rent, and food.” She called the president “small minded” and “narcissistic.”
Streisand Weighs In
One of the institution’s own honorees has been drawn into the fight as well. Barbra Streisand, 84, a winner of an Emmy, a Grammy and an Oscar who was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2008, published a statement on Thursday, September 17, ridiculing the president’s “unchecked ego.”
“That is why what is happening to the Kennedy Center is so galling and painful to witness,” Streisand wrote. She said “a humiliated Trump” was pressing on with his attempts to mark the building through his “Trump-aligned board,” and that “a thoroughly defeated Trump has announced that the Kennedy Center is being closed for what the completely stacked board describes as a major renovation. Oddly, when Trump’s name was still on the building, there was no discussion of closing it!”
His attempt to place his name alongside the late President John F. Kennedy’s at the building’s entrance, she said, met widespread opposition from artists and much of the public. Renamed for Kennedy after his assassination in 1963, the living memorial opened to the public in 1971. Streisand closed her statement by urging Americans to vote in November’s midterm elections.