President Trump has found a new adversary in Jimmy Fallon.
The President took to his favorite figurative megaphone, Twitter, on Sunday night to tell the late-night host to “Be a man.”
The tweet followed an interview Fallon did with The Hollywood Reporter, published Saturday, in which he looked back on a September 2016 episode featuring Trump. In the episode, Fallon asked Trump, then the Republican nominee for president, if he could “mess up” the nominee’s hair.
Looking back on the episode, Fallon told THR that he faced severe backlash from people who thought the late-night host had “normalized” Trump and drew criticism from his colleagues.
Calling it a “downtime,” Fallon said that he “made a mistake,” and apologized if he “made anyone mad.” He also said that “looking back” he would have done things “differently.”
Fallon went on to insist that he had not done the stint for the ratings, saying, “I don’t really care about the ratings. I never will. That’s someone else’s job at NBC.”
While Fallon might not care about the ratings, it seems that at least one person does: the president. In Trump’s Sunday tweet, he referred to Fallon’s interview, saying that the host was “whimpering to all that he did the famous ‘hair show’ with me (where he seriously messed up my hair),” continuing that Fallon “is taking heat,” but that he had “called & said ‘monster ratings.’” Trump concluded by calling on him to “Be a man Jimmy!”
.@jimmyfallon is now whimpering to all that he did the famous “hair show” with me (where he seriously messed up my hair), & that he would have now done it differently because it is said to have “humanized” me-he is taking heat. He called & said “monster ratings.” Be a man Jimmy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 25, 2018
By late Sunday, Fallon appeared to have taken the President’s words to heart—albeit perhaps not in the way he intended. The late-night host wrote on Twitter that “In honor of the President’s tweet I’ll be making a donation to RAICES in his name.”
In honor of the President’s tweet I’ll be making a donation to RAICES in his name.
— Jimmy Fallon (@jimmyfallon) June 25, 2018
RAICES, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, is the Texas non-profit that has been the center of an enormous Facebook fundraiser that has raised over $20 million to date. The organization aims to reunite immigrant families that have been separated at the U.S.-Mexico border by providing free or low-cost legal services.