Last week, Jimmy Kimmel apologized for airing a deceptive clip that appeared to show Vice President Mike Pence delivering empty boxes to a nursing home. The vice president’s office apparently demanded an “on-air” apology as well. They got a lot more than that Monday night.
“The trouble started because at one point in the video, after awkwardly lugging heavy boxes to the door, Mike Pence finds some empty boxes in the back of the van,” Kimmel explained. It turns out Pence was “joking” when he asked if he could just carry the empty boxes for the photo op.
“How anyone can tell when Mike Pence is joking, I don’t know,” the host said. “I didn’t know because I only watched part of the video. I do not have the mental endurance it requires to watch Mike Pence deliver boxes for 29 minutes on C-SPAN.”
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“Bottom line is, I was wrong,” Kimmel admitted. “He was joking, I didn’t know.” When he learned that he’d “made a mistake,” he took the video down and issued his written apology. “Apologizing to the Trump administration for spreading untruth is like apologizing to Barry Bonds for using steroids,” he joked. “It’s hard.”
“But the outrage from the MAGA hats, the outpouring of venom, was disgusting,” he added. “Stupid too, but mostly disgusting.” Kimmel revealed that “some of these lunatics” have the “audacity” to call themselves Christians, “but that didn’t stop them from wishing death on me, on my family, on my son.”
All for airing what they are calling a “doctored” video. “It was not a doctored video, by the way, we didn’t do anything to it,” the host said. “Doctors are the people Donald Trump doesn’t listen to.”
Now that he has apologized to the vice president, Kimmel called on Pence to “ask his boss, who lies every time there isn’t a McNugget in his mouth, to apologize for the following perversions of decency and democracy.”
“Mike Pence has stood by, and warmly enabled, with a smug little twinkle in his eye these things for four miserable years,” Kimmel said, before listing offenses that included “separating thousands of migrant children from their parents,” “calling Neo-Nazis ‘very fine people,’” “ignoring warnings on coronavirus” and a lot more.
Finally, Kimmel addressed the tweet that Trump himself posted about Kimmel’s error on Mother’s Day morning. “More Fake news, this time from Jimmy Kimmel’s last place show!” the president posted during a barrage of 126 tweets and retweets on Sunday.
“He tweeted once every seven and a half minutes yesterday,” Kimmel said. “That’s impressive. He ignored a pandemic and his wife on Mother’s Day. He really can do it all.
In response, Kimmel wrote, “Go make Melania brunch.”
“Still no word if he did,” the host joked. “So anyway, this is what the White House is working on and thinking about right now. This really is the dumbest time to be alive.”
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