ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel has settled on a new nickname for President Donald Trump, and it turns entirely on how often the president has been caught dozing in public. In his monologue on Tuesday, September 15, 2026, Kimmel, a longtime Trump nemesis, mocked the 80-year-old president for seeming to drift off during the September 11 memorial ceremony, held on the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
The comedian’s coinage: “Teddy Doze-evelt.”
“At the event, Teddy Doze-evelt got in a pretty good nap,” Kimmel said, before pointing out that the White House had issued a statement denying the president had fallen asleep.
“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 Supercut of Public Catnaps
The host backed up the joke with a montage — close to a minute of clips catching Trump with his eyes shut: as he was sworn in in 2025, during the Fourth of July fireworks display, at the third game of the NBA Finals, while marking Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery, at the funeral for Pope Francis, at services for Sen. Lindsey Graham, in a string of Cabinet meetings, and at the September 11 memorials both this year and last.
Kimmel then turned the bit into a charge of hypocrisy, reminding viewers of the years Trump spent attacking former President Joe Biden’s age and alertness under the label “Sleepy Joe.”
The president has given his own explanation for the closed eyes. In January, he denied that he had been asleep at earlier Cabinet meetings, saying he shut his eyes because the sessions were “pretty boring.” The Memorial Day appearance at Arlington also earned him a social media jab from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who revived a nickname of his own for the president: “Dozy Don.”
Kimmel’s Backhanded Compliment
The segment did hand Trump one compliment, though it came with a catch. “Compared to Mitch McConnell, Trump has more energy than Kevin Hart,” Kimmel joked, then rolled a clip of the 84-year-old senator looking dazed as he came back to the job in a wheelchair, having been away for upwards of three months.
Trump’s Kennedy Center Standoff
The nickname was not Kimmel’s only target. On Wednesday, September 16, he turned his attention to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., where the board of trustees had voted on Tuesday, September 15, to shut the main building’s doors for two years of renovations — a decision Trump announced on Truth Social. Kimmel said the vote came moments after a judge ruled that Trump’s name could not be added to the building without approval from Congress, and that the president was threatening to scrap the renovations altogether unless the Supreme Court overturned that ruling. He suggested renaming the building for First Lady Melania Trump.
Trump has made the arts center one of the fixations of his second term. After returning to office in 2025, he installed himself as chairman and put his name on the building. In May, a federal judge barred him from keeping it there, inside or outside, and workers quickly removed “Donald J. Trump” from the facade.
Asked by a reporter in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday, September 16, why the naming matters so much, the president called the center a mess and a financial loser, saying it had lost tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of dollars. He argued that if his administration takes the center on long-term, or raises the money to keep it running, it deserves recognition — and that without that, the complex will close and end up ripped down, in what he described as very dangerous shape.
Streisand Joins the Backlash
The fight has also pulled in one of the institution’s own honorees. Barbra Streisand, 84, the EGOT-winning Hollywood and Broadway star 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. Trump’s 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, and she noted that no one had talked about closing the venue while his name was still on it. The center, a living memorial renamed for Kennedy after his assassination in 1963, opened to the public in 1971. Streisand closed her statement by urging Americans to vote in November’s midterm elections.