With just a week to go before the 2024 election, Jimmy Kimmel opened his show Tuesday with a serious plea to viewers.
“Tonight’s monologue is for Republicans,” Kimmel said. “So, if you have someone in your life who is either planning to vote for Trump or thinking about it, I would like you to send this to a Republican you love and respect, with a request: ask them to watch this whole thing, as a personal favor to you.”
Kimmel noted that the country is so divided not just because of Trump but because of people like Kimmel himself.
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“I do a lot of mocking, and belittling, and it isn’t always productive,” he admitted. “Do I think I have good reasons for being biased against him? Yes. And I’m probably wrong, but I think when you hear some of those reasons, you might agree with me even just a tiny bit.”
Throughout his monologue, Kimmel asked Trump supporters to really sit and focus on the things Trump has said over the years, and what that shows about his leadership.
“Since 2015, [Trump’s] been saying he wants to abolish Obamacare with something better,” Kimmel pointed out. He played a montage of clips of Trump promising, one year after another, that he was about to announce his new replacement health-care plan any day now.
“Donald Trump was president for four years,” Kimmel said. “You would think that at this point he would have some answers, some kind of plan, for simple questions about subjects like health care and childcare.”
Kimmel argued that the things Trump has lied about go far beyond the scope of what a politician should ever get away with it, using his repeated fearmongering around forced sex-change operations in elementary schools as an example:
“I understand this is a tough subject… but this alarm he keeps sounding, about forced sex change operations, this is not happening. This is an imaginary problem,” Kimmel said.
“This is a lie, you have to know this,” Kimmel added. “You do know this. This is not real. The president should be focused on things that are actually things.”
Kimmel detailed the sheer extent of Trump’s aging, as well as the obvious grifts he pushes like his made-in-China Trump Bibles, and asked Trump supporters, “How does this not bother anyone? How is this not embarrassing?”
Kimmel listed the details of Trump’s election interference in 2020 along with the signs that Trump will try to do it again in 2024. He noted the many prominent Republicans, including Trump’s own former vice president Mike Pence, who have refused to endorse him in his latest run.
“This has never happened before,” Kimmel pointed out, speaking in front of a wall of photos of all the Republicans who’ve turned on the former president.
Kimmel argued, “I saw a shirt the other day, it said, ‘I support Trump because he pisses off the people who piss me off.’ But is that really all we want for America? To piss each other off? I don’t want that.”
For more, listen to Seth Meyers on The Last Laugh podcast.
