On Thursday, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel continued his steady stream of Donald Trump-themed monologues, with a series of partisan takes on the most recent Trump news. While his audience enthusiastically applauded most of his jabs at Trump, one missed the mark with a segment of the audience, who responded with groans to the host going out of his way to drop a sexual joke about Trump’s daughter.
Referencing recent reports that one of the leading candidates to replace Gen. John Kelly as Trump’s chief of staff is none other then Trump’s son-in-law and key adviser Jared Kushner, Kimmel decided to work in a sexual reference to his wife, Ivanka.
“I guess the thinking of [Trump] is: if he’s good enough to screw my daughter, he’s good enough to screw the country,” said Kimmel.
The response from the usually quick-to-laugh audience was mixed, some groaning loudly at the tasteless joke.
“I hope he hires Jared,” Kimmel added, attempting to move on quickly. “I hope he hires Jared and then he fires Jared so we go through the whole thing.”
The sexual joke followed a series of other predictably Trump-disparaging quips that conveniently highlighted as much of the bad reports surrounding the president as he could muster in the brief monologue.
Among the topics he ran through was Trump canceling the annual White House holiday party for the press, which Kimmel used as a means of fantasizing about Trump canceling the Republican Party altogether, an idea that got big cheers from his audience. If Trump were to hold the party for the press, suggested Kimmel, it would end up like the bloody “red wedding” from “Game of Thrones.”
Describing Trump as “Old Yeller,” Kimmel then commented on him “barking up quite a storm on Twitter this morning” about his former lawyer Michael Cohen’s claim that he sent illegal “hush money” payments to Trump’s alleged former mistresses at Trump’s direction. Kimmel then read through part of one of Trump’s tweets:
I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law. He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law. It is called ‘advice of counsel,’ and a lawyer has great liability if a mistake is made.
“That’s actually true,” said Kimmel, who appeared to be struggling at times to get through the monologue. “He didn’t tell Michael Cohen to break the law. He paid him to break the law.” Kimmel then offered a flashback of Trump saying he didn’t know about the $130,000 NDA payment to Stormy Daniels.
“First it was I never had sex with those women, then it was I never paid those women, now it’s I assumed it was legal to pay those women,” said Kimmel. “Next week he’ll say he didn’t know they were women, that’s why he asked them to take off their clothes.” His crowd liked that joke much more than the Ivanka reference.
Kimmel then moved on to the newly announced investigation into Trump’s inaugural committee, which spent a record $103 million and is now reportedly under scrutiny for potential redirection of funds. For that Trump-damaging story, Kimmel worked in a joke dissing the committee for only being able to land “Three Doors Down.”
Video below via “Jimmy Kimmel Live”: