ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel has landed on a new name for President Donald Trump, and it rests entirely on how often the president has been caught dozing in public. Kimmel, a longtime Trump nemesis, 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.
The coinage: “Teddy Doze-evelt.”
“At the event, Teddy Doze-evelt got in a pretty good nap,” Kimmel said, adding that the White House had denied the president fell asleep. The White House has published no such statement, and none has been 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 sell the joke, the host rolled a montage of clips — close to a minute of footage catching Trump with his eyes shut. His swearing-in in 2025 opened the reel, followed by the Fourth of July fireworks display and the third game of the NBA Finals, then Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day, 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.
The bit doubled as a hypocrisy charge. Trump, Kimmel reminded the audience, had spent years going after former President Joe Biden’s age and alertness with the label “Sleepy Joe.”
Trump has offered his own account of the closed eyes. The president denied in January that he had been asleep at earlier Cabinet meetings; he shut his eyes, he said, because the sessions were “pretty boring.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has his own nickname for the president, took a social media jab at his Memorial Day appearance at Arlington: “Dozy Don.”
A Backhanded Compliment for Trump
One compliment did make it into the segment, and it came with a catch. “Compared to Mitch McConnell, Trump has more energy than Kevin Hart,” Kimmel joked, cuing up footage in which the 84-year-old senator looked dazed as he returned to the job in a wheelchair after upwards of three months away.
Trump’s Kennedy Center Standoff
The nickname was not Kimmel’s only target. The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., drew his attention on Wednesday, September 16, a day after its board of trustees voted to close the main building immediately for two years of renovations, with a reopening projected for 2028. He suggested renaming it for First Lady Melania Trump.
In the same September 16 monologue, Kimmel put up photos of the exteriors of the Department of Labor and Department of the Interior, telling viewers Trump is “putting his name, for whatever reason, on everything in town. And his face, too.” His kicker: “At this point, the only thing he doesn’t want his name on is Don Jr.”
Also on September 16, Kimmel aired a doctored version of Second Lady Usha Vance’s National Diaper Bank Network ad, in which the edited audio said diaper banks “help America’s oldest president evacuate his bowels so he can get some sleep.”
Minutes before the board voted, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that congressional approval is required before the president’s name can go on the building or its grounds. “Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Cooper wrote.
Trump answered on Truth Social in a post dated Tuesday, September 15, saying he was closing the center “for safety reasons” after the judge denied efforts to add the phrase “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump” to the building’s exterior. The closing, he wrote, “will take place immediately,” but “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.” Should that ruling go against him, he added, “and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”
Published figures for the work vary: a $100 million fundraising campaign was reported, while other outlets put the renovation itself at $257 million.
Kennedy Center administrators told the board in recent days that the main building’s physical plant is unsafe and that the center’s finances are “within weeks” of bankruptcy. Rep. Joyce Beatty, Democrat of Ohio, the plaintiff in the federal suit, filed Trump’s statement with the federal judge.
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 removed “Donald J. Trump” from the facade.
A reporter in Charlotte, N.C., asked the president on Wednesday, September 16, why the naming matters so much. The center, in his telling, is a mess and a financial loser that had lost tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of dollars. If his administration takes the center on long-term, he argued, or raises the money to keep it running, it deserves recognition. Absent that, he said, the complex will close and end up ripped down, in what he described as very dangerous shape.
Kennedy’s Niece Hits Back
Maria Shriver, a niece of the late President John F. Kennedy, went after Trump on X earlier that week. “This statement from Trump blows my mind,” she wrote. “That a sitting president would not let any renovations to a public building go on unless he gets to first put his name in the said building… What a sad state of affairs. What a tragedy.” She called him “small minded” and “narcissistic.”
Streisand Enters the Fight
One of the institution’s own honorees has been drawn in as well. Barbra Streisand, 84, an Emmy, Grammy and Oscar winner and a Kennedy Center honoree in 2008, put out 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. Artists and much of the public, she said, widely opposed the president’s attempt to place his name alongside the late President John F. Kennedy’s at the building’s entrance. No one, she added, had talked about closing the venue while his name was still on it. A living memorial renamed for Kennedy after his assassination in 1963, the center opened to the public in 1971. Streisand ended her statement by urging Americans to vote in November’s midterm elections.
