Jimmy Kimmel
Jimmy Kimmel took the stage on Tuesday evening on “one of the two groggiest days in Hollywood” after the Emmys the night before – the lowest-rated Emmys telecast ever, with 5.92 million viewers on NBC. “But that’s not really the whole story, because it was also on Peacock, so when you add in people who streamed it there, it’s still 5.92m viewers,” Kimmel joked.
Kimmel and his staff lost best variety series to Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, but “even though we didn’t win, it was an honor just to get Covid from those who did win”, he quipped.
Kimmel then turned to yet another book about the end of the Trump presidency, this time by the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. In Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, Haberman reported that Trump had vowed after his defeat in the 2020 election to remain in the White House, telling an aide: “We’re never leaving.”
“It was like when you try to tell a five-year-old it’s time to leave Disneyland,” said Kimmel. “Fortunately, the Oval Office is oval, so you can’t really pile furniture up against the door. But how would he see that working? Would he and Joe Biden be roommates?
“I mean, on one hand it’s treason. On the other hand, great idea for a comedy show.”
Kimmel also touched on the unprecedented search for a special master to review classified documents seized at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home last month. This week, the justice department said it would consider one of nominees from Trump’s legal team: Raymond Dearie, the former chief judge of the federal court in the eastern district of New York.
“Let me tell you how this goes from here,” said Kimmel. “Donald Trump just picked a guy who will decide whether or not, or to what extent, crimes have been committed. The justice department said OK, we accept this guy, Judge Dearie, as special master. He will look at the evidence, which is pretty clearcut, he will agree with the FBI, give them all the documents, and once he does, Trump will call him a puppet controlled by the Democrats.
“The whole thing is a distraction,” he concluded. “It doesn’t matter what’s in the documents. Just taking them out of the White House is a crime under the Espionage and Presidential Records Acts, and they still don’t know whether Trump returned all the documents he took. Which, of course he didn’t. That’s like being unsure if Cookie Monster ate all the cookies.”
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers opened with Joe Biden’s 9/11 tribute at the Pentagon on Sunday, in which Biden said: “It’s not enough to stand up for democracy once a year.”
“‘I don’t know, I’m making it work’ – said Joe Manchin,” Meyers quipped.
In other news, gas prices have decreased for 89 straight days, “or as Fox News reported it, ‘Biden leaves oil markets in shambles!’” said Meyers.
And Buckingham Palace announced that invitations for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral would only extend to current heads of state and not former presidents, “which is a bummer, because we all kinda wanted to hear that eulogy”, said Meyers, breaking out his Trump impression: “Elizabeth, she loved everyone at Hogwarts, even the gingers, and if she were here right now, I know what she’d say. She’d say January 6th was mostly antifa.”
