Nap jokes now have a presidential brand name. ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, a longtime Trump nemesis, used his monologue on Tuesday, September 15, 2026, to hang a new nickname on President Donald Trump, 80, built entirely around how often the president has been caught dozing in public — most recently seeming to drift off at 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, telling viewers 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 Supercut of Public Catnaps
To back the bit, the host rolled a montage of clips — close to a minute of footage catching Trump with his eyes shut: as he was sworn in in 2025, during the Fourth of July fireworks display, in the third game of the NBA Finals, on Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery, at the funeral for Pope Francis, at July’s funeral for Sen. Lindsey Graham, in a run of Cabinet meetings, and at September 11 memorials both last year and this one.
Kimmel then turned the segment into a hypocrisy charge, reminding his audience of the years Trump spent attacking former President Joe Biden’s age and alertness under the label “Sleepy Joe.”
The president has offered his own account of 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” — needled him on social media over the Memorial Day appearance at Arlington.
Kimmel’s Backhanded Compliment
One compliment did surface in the bit, and it came with a catch. “Compared to Mitch McConnell, Trump has more energy than Kevin Hart,” Kimmel joked, cueing a clip of the 84-year-old senator looking dazed as he returned to the job in a wheelchair after an absence of 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. Its board of trustees had voted the previous day to close the main building immediately for two years of renovations; the projected reopening is 2028. Kimmel suggested renaming the place for First Lady Melania Trump.
The trustees acted minutes after U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that neither the building nor its grounds could carry the president’s name 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. Trump then said the reconstruction “will not take place” unless the Supreme Court overturned the decision. Published figures for the work vary: one account describes a $100 million fundraising campaign, while other outlets put the renovation itself at $257 million.
Trump has returned to the arts center again and again as one of the fixations of his second term. He made himself chairman after returning to office in 2025 and put his name on the building. In May, a federal judge barred him from keeping it there, inside or outside, and workers quickly stripped “Donald J. Trump” from the facade.
In Charlotte, N.C., on Wednesday, September 16, a reporter asked the president why the naming matters so much. He called the center 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 — and short of that, the complex will close and end up ripped down, in what he described as very dangerous shape.
Streisand Joins the Backlash
One of the institution’s own honorees has been pulled into the fight. Barbra Streisand, 84, a winner of an Emmy, a Grammy and an Oscar and 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. Artists and much of the public, she said, widely opposed Trump’s attempt to place his name alongside the late President John F. Kennedy’s at the building’s entrance, and she noted that no one 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. Her statement closed with a call for Americans to vote in November’s midterm elections.