Molly McNearney, the wife of Jimmy Kimmel, admits she has “lost” relationships with relatives who support Donald Trump amid the ongoing feud between the late night talk show host and the president. McNearney, as a co-head writer and executive producer for Jimmy Kimmel Live, delved into how her life with her conservative family has been strained on a November 6 episode of the We Can Do Hard Things podcast. Due to Kimmel’s comments about Trump on Jimmy Kimmel Live in September, the network pulled the show for about a week until it was reinstated.
McNearney says her conservative relatives are “deliberately being misinformed”
The podcast hosts asked McNearney, alongside Kimmel, on what it has been like growing up in a conservative family in St. Louis, Missouri and then changing her political beliefs.
“It’s definitely been challenging,” McNearney admitted. While she was “upset” when Trump won the 2016 presidential race against Hillary Clinton, she said she could “understand it.” But now that the fight between Kimmel and Trump has become personal, her relatives’ support for Trump has become less tolerable, despite her having “sympathy” for people she believes “are deliberately being misinformed every day.”
“It hurts me so much because of the personal relationship I now have where my husband is out there fighting this man,” she said of the feud. “And to me, them voting for Trump is them not voting for my husband and me and our family.” This has caused her to sever ties with some of her family members.
McNearney believes that the party headed by Trump doesn’t represent the values she grew up with. “This is not just Republican versus Democrat for me anymore. It is, to me, it’s family values and it’s really hard for me because I grew up believing in these Christian ideals of taking care of the sick and taking care of the poor and I don’t see that happening with this Republican party.”
Despite sending emails to her family about why not to vote for Trump, she was “ignored by 90% of them or got truly insane responses.” While she says a part of her doesn’t “let politics get in the way,” she says that their values were “not aligned anymore.”
