As one of the few late-night hosts to tape his show on Pacific Time, Jimmy Kimmel had a major advantage over his East Coast competitors Tuesday night. That’s because Kimmel waited until after President Trump gave his primetime address to take the stage and deliver his monologue rebuttal.
“This was Trump’s first address from the Oval Office,” Kimmel told ABC viewers who had this week’s episode of black-ish preempted for the speech. “Up until now, he’d been using it for Kardashian meet-and-greets. But tonight, he got very serious.”
“All the major networks covered his speech live, and for good reason,” the host continued. “It was historic. Rarely does a president of the United States interrupt primetime television to warn us about a completely made-up thing.” Noting that Trump’s speech was about 10 minutes long, Kimmel added, “which, according to Stormy Daniels, is about eight minutes longer than he usually lasts.”
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In response to the debate among the big three broadcast networks about “whether or not it is appropriate to give the president a forum to lie to us on television,” Kimmel joked that they decided to air it with a special disclaimer: “The following presidential address is a work of fiction. All personalities, incidents, events, locations and facts were pulled directly from the president’s ass. Any resemblance to reality is entirely coincidental.”
“So with that as a caveat, the president spoke,” Kimmel said. “He did not mention the caravan that was coming to get us three months ago. I don’t know what happened to that, but I guess it disappeared when the election was done.”
“But he does want us to believe there is a crisis at the border besides the one he created,” he added. “He desperately wants us to be worried about the border.”
But Kimmel believes Trump has made a big “mistake” on this front: “If you are Donald Trump—God forbid—and you make a dumb promise during your campaign like 200 different times to build a wall, and your plan to fulfill that promise you didn’t know you were going to have to fulfill is to get people panicked enough to waste five billion dollars on it, going on TV and telling us there are ‘bad hombres’ sneaking over the border, that’s not going to do it.”
Instead, he said if Trump really wants to “come up with a fake border crisis” he should have gone on TV to “say there is an army of chupacabras crawling in through Tijuana. Tell everyone they have red eyes, they’ve got sharp claws and if we don’t stop them, they’re going to eat our children and our Instagram. That’s how you get people fired up!”
Of course, Kimmel didn’t have anything better to say about the official Democratic response from Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. “These two,” he said. “I don’t know how many years Ryan and Kelly have left on their contract, but if Nancy and Chuck ever decide to team up… someone needs to get Gelman on the phone. Because they are terrific!”
“That’s either a hall or the White House morgue, I’m not sure,” he joked.
