“The White House is really working overtime trying to put this racist talk to rest,” Jimmy Kimmel said in his monologue on Tuesday, just as President Donald Trump’s “shithole-gate” entered its sixth day.
“Somehow, the president’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, escaped the building today, she was out in the wild where reporters caught up to her,” the host continued.
When Fox News correspondent John Roberts asked Huckabee Sanders why Trump can’t just prove he’s not racist by following Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s advice and agreeing to the bipartisan deal to protect the DREAMers, she quickly shut him down. Why, she wondered aloud, would NBC give Trump a show for a decade if he were a racist?
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“Oh, I don’t know, Bill Cosby had a show on NBC for a decade,” Kimmel shot back. “I don’t think there’s a background check,” he added, laughing.
Also on Tuesday, while watching a misleading Fox & Friends segment, Trump tweeted that his approval rating among black Americans has “doubled” since he took office. As CNN reported, Trump’s support among black voters has actually decreased from 15 percent after his inauguration to 6 percent a year later.
The most recent CNN poll, taken in December, found that only 3 percent of black Americans in the country approved of his performance as president. “Dandruff is more popular among African-Americans than Donald Trump,” Kimmel joked. “And he’s bragging about it!”
Huckabee Sanders’ comments, meanwhile, are especially misguided given that, as The Daily Beast reported in December 2016, Trump allegedly made numerous racist remarks on the set of his NBC show The Apprentice. After he announced his presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and criminals, the network declared it would no longer be working with him in any capacity.
“At NBC, respect and dignity for all people are cornerstones of our values,” a spokesperson said in a statement at the time. Yet somehow, after Trump was elected president, he remained an executive producer of The New Celebrity Apprentice, hosted by Arnold Schwarzenegger, which ran for just seven episodes at the beginning of 2017.
