Chuck Lorre was supposed to spend his big night saying thank you. Instead, the sitcom heavyweight took the mic at a Los Angeles charity gala and aimed it straight at Donald Trump and Melania.
Now the White House is firing back with a diagnosis of its own, and it is anything but polite. Its response suggests one part of the speech cut deeper than the rest.
It was a line aimed at a first lady whose frosty public moments with her husband have kept rumors swirling for months.
The man behind “The Big Bang Theory,” “Two and a Half Men” and “Mom” has spent decades writing punchlines for network TV. This time, he saved his sharpest ones for Trump, and he didn’t bother cleaning them up for primetime.
Lorre was the guest of honor at Project Angel Food’s Angel Awards on Sept. 26, where he received the Founders Angel Award.
The gala was the first major event at the nonprofit’s new kitchen and campus, which bears the name of the Chuck Lorre Family Foundation in recognition of what Project Angel Food called its “transformational generosity.” The organization delivers medically tailored meals to people in Los Angeles County facing serious and life-threatening illnesses.
Rather than reading off a list of thank-yous, Lorre played the man who would love to stay on topic but just can’t help himself. “Sure, I’d love to stand here and talk about my deep yearning for a more compassionate government,” he said, per Yahoo News. “But the burden of my profession demands that I take this opportunity to say a few words about that bloated orange piece of s–t in the White House.”
He kept going, telling the room that as a comedy writer he wakes up every morning and turns on CNN “to see if the President of the United States had a heart attack while straining to take a dump.”
Then he turned to Melania. While nudging guests to open their wallets for the charity, Lorre said his “need to cause laughter” forced him to question how a country could embrace “a smart, educated, warm, funny first lady like Michelle Obama and somehow be OK with a surgically enhanced, cold-hearted Yugoslavian escort who clearly hates her husband.” Melania was born in Slovenia when it was still part of Yugoslavia.
Lorre didn’t spare his own side, either. He urged the Democratic National Committee to “run from the suicidal insanity of the far-left woke culture” in the coming election and knocked Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over his views on vaccines.
He closed with his own spin on the Serenity Prayer, asking for the courage to call Trump “a Russian asset,” tacking on a jab invoking Jeffrey Epstein, and “the wisdom to end on a cheap laugh.”
The White House did not laugh. “Chuck Lorre should immediately seek psychiatric help to treat his severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has completely rotted his peanut-sized brain,” spokesperson Davis Ingle told Fox News.
Online, the clapback only seemed to win Lorre more fans. One person wrote in the comments section of an X post, “Love Chuck Lorre for this,” while another argued that the White House “deploying official press statements calling a TV producer ‘peanut-brained’ over jokes at a Project Angel Food charity gala is pure panic.”
If Ingle’s statement sounds familiar, that’s because the White House has run this play previously. In August, the administration went after Rosie O’Donnell after she spent a week roasting Trump while guest-hosting “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Ingle called her “a nasty woman and a total slob whose brain has been completely destroyed by Trump Derangement Syndrome.” O’Donnell responded by posting an unflattering photo of the president.
Lorre’s “hates her husband” crack also lands while Melania’s every move is under a microscope. A Trump insider recently suggested her return to the spotlight was carefully staged, and author Michael Wolff has claimed she hasn’t spent a single night at the White House during Trump’s second term.
As for Lorre, he’s about to have an even bigger platform. His memoir, “Sitcom: A Memoir,” is due from HarperCollins this month. If the gala was a preview, Trump probably won’t be reading it.
