The conservative news media seems to take pleasure reporting on how the political divide in our country splits up families, and they’re not just talking about all the parents and grandparents whom ICE has grabbed while they waited to pick their kids up from school.
For reasons known only to President Donald Trump and his FCC Chair Brendan Carr, in 2025, Jimmy Kimmel unintentionally became the poster child for anti-Trump protest on popular television after the federal government attempted to silence his nightly punchlines at the President’s expense.
How Kimmel became the Trump Administration’s public enemy number one in the media remains a mystery, but the comedy star’s nightly jokes about the hue of Trump’s skin and the size of his little rascal have put a target on Kimmel’s back, one at which the entire conservative media continues to take shots.
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As such, when Kimmel’s wife and Jimmy Kimmel Live! co-head writer Molly McNearney opened up about how her relationships with Trump-voting family members have deteriorated due to political differences during a recent appearance on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast, Fox News jumped at the chance to frame McNearney’s comments in a way that makes it look like Kimmel is tearing his family apart with his radical partisanship.
In an article titled, “Jimmy Kimmel’s wife is ‘angry all the time’ after losing relationships with Trump-voting family members,” Fox News lamented the demise of mixed-politics family dynamics, presumably to make Fox readers feel better about the fact that their daughters haven’t called them since last November.
McNearney, who said she grew up in a Christian family with many conservative relatives who now support Trump, said that, given how Trump has repeatedly targeted Kimmel in his inflammatory rhetoric and in his attempts to punish the media for dissent, this past election cycle felt especially personal.
“It hurts me so much because of the personal relationship I now have, where my husband is out there fighting this man, and to me, them voting for Trump is them not voting for my husband and me and our family,” McNearney explained, “And I unfortunately have kind of lost relationships with people in my family because of it.”
Throughout the episode McNearney lamented how politics had poisoned her family dynamic and admitted that, in an ideal world, she would be still be able to keep those relationships with Trump-voting family members, but, after they rejected her many attempts to bridge the gap and explain her perspective, she has had to spend more time with relatives who share her values and less time with those who don’t.
Absent from Fox News‘ coverage of the podcast is Kimmel’s response to his wife’s story about her inability to reconcile with conservative family members, as the late night host advocated for empathy and understanding towards the Trump-voting aunts, uncles and cousins.
“I just think that they’re being fed a constant stream of lies,” Kimmel explained of the differences between McNearney and her relatives, “And I think that we live in a country where we were programmed to believe the middle-aged white guy on television telling us the news, and, fortunately for us, for most of our lives, we had good people in those positions – you know, your Walter Cronkite, your Dan Rather, Ted Koppel, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw – who you could genuinely trust and who seemed to be educated and honest people.”
“And, now, there’s this cosplay version of it that we see on Fox News and all these other wannabe Fox News channels that are telling lies for profit,” Kimmel continued, “They know what pushes people’s buttons… and it looks like the news, and they call it the news, and it’s not the news. It’s not fair, it’s not balanced, and, when you ingest enough of it, you start to believe it.”
Kimmel concluded, “If those outlets didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have this.”
Naturally, Fox News ignored all that and trusted their readers to do the same. Instead, Fox hyper-focused on the parts of the conversation in which McNearney expressed the guilt she feels in cutting certain members of her family out of her life, including her wish that politics wouldn’t play such a large role in her family relationships – even though, as the wife of Trump’s least favorite comedian, it’s not exactly her choice to just ignore politics in any facet of her life.
The Fox News editing of the episode frames this familial deterioration as McNearney and Kimmel’s doing, a fact that the couple themselves appear to acknowledge absent context. Since the rise of Trump, more and more left-leaning young people are cutting off contact with family members who don’t share their values, just as McNearney’s relatives don’t share hers, and many Fox readers have certainly been on the receiving end of such experiences.
However, in most cases, the President isn’t personally calling for those young people’s partners to lose their job and face jail time for their political views.
What McNearney and her husband are really mourning here is how entire generations of families have been corrupted by the conservative propaganda machine and either cannot or will not entertain viewpoints that contradict the official party lines of Fox News. And, when issues such as the election of a man who has made it his life’s mission to destroy her husband’s life are on the ballot, McNearney simply doesn’t have the luxury of ignoring her relatives’ voting record.
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