Jimmy Kimmel on a tumultuous year: ‘Don’t know what the American way even is any more’

Jimmy Kimmel opened his final monologue of 2025 with an emotional reflection on a tumultuous year. “This has been a strange year. It’s been a hard year,” he said. “We’ve had some lows. We’ve had some highs. For me, maybe more than any year of my life.”

Kimmel, of course, endured a brief suspension of his show under pressure from the Trump administration, igniting national outcry over censorship, as well as the death of his childhood friend and longtime band leader Cleto Escobedo. Though the host said he thought the show would be gone forever, he ultimately signed a one-year contract extension with ABC.

“On behalf of all of us at the show, I just want to say that we appreciate your support, your enthusiasm, and not just for watching. This year, you literally pulled us out of a hole and we cannot thank you enough,” Kimmel told the audience. “I know there are a lot harder jobs, but this is not an easy job to do and sometimes it feels like we’re spinning our wheels. You see so many awful and destructive acts, all this damage we inflict on ourselves on purpose, and it can make you feel crazy trying to wrap your head around these things that are so clearly wrong.

“You know, you grew up reading Superman, and you learn to value truth, justice and the American way, and then you start to realize, especially over the last year, you don’t know where that all went,” he continued. “You don’t know what the American way even is any more. But when I hear from people who tell me that they watch our show and the shows that my friends and colleagues do on the other channels and that it makes them feel less crazy. It makes me feel less crazy too, and I think that’s an important thing.

“I also think it’s important that we as Americans let our friends in other countries who watch the show on YouTube, on Instagram, Hulu, wherever, know that a lot of us are not OK with what is happening,” he added. “There is still much more good in this country than bad, and we hope that you will bear with us during this extended psychotic episode that we’re in the middle of.”

Kimmel then turned to Trump’s end-of-year message on prime time, which constituted “18 straight minutes of him yelling. It’s like the whole country got to experience what it was like to be Eric in the eighth grade.

“And while his delivery was erratic, his message was insane,” he added before several clips that seemed outlandish even for the outlandish president. “There were so many lies. Eleven factcheckers died watching that speech last night,” Kimmel joked. “At some points, it was hard to tell if he was giving a speech or having a seizure on TV.”

Seth Meyers

On Late Night, Seth Meyers also combed through Trump’s primetime address “in which the president once again tried to convince people that actually, things are great, and if they’re not, it’s the Democrats’ fault”.

Trump claimed, among other things, that other countries were “not laughing any more” at the US, that “the worst thing that the Biden administration did to our country is the invasion at the border” and that Democrats were “demanding” the increase in health premiums. Also: “One year ago our country was dead. We were absolutely dead. Our country was ready to fail, totally fail. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world.”

The whole spectacle made Meyers exclaim: “Stop yelling at us, grandpa! If you don’t want us to come home and visit you at the retirement home on Christmas, we’ll happily stay where we are.

“Also, I’m sorry, but if you need to tell people that America is the ‘hottest country in the world’, that means it’s not,” he added. “If you’re walking through midtown and someone hands you a flyer that says ‘the hottest club in Times Square’, don’t go there. It will just be you and 50 dads from Wisconsin trying to figure out how a beer can cost $23.

“The speech was so unhinged and so full of obvious lies that CNN’s factchecker had to race through them and still ran out of time,” he concluded. “Americans are struggling with rising costs and a slowing economy, and instead of demonstrating empathy and a plan to fix it, Trump’s just scolding everyone through the TV.”

Stephen Colbert

“I think years from now, we’ll all remember where we were when we did not watch Donald Trump’s speech last night,” said Stephen Colbert on the Late Show.

The White House requested that all major national networks pre-empt their 9pm ET programming, a big ask that usually only happens “for something really big, like George W Bush declaring the war on terror, Obama revealing that American forces had killed Bin Laden, or Joe Biden announcing that the Amtrak dining car now has warm cookies”.

The big national emergency this time? As Trump put it: “Good evening, America. Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess and I’m fixing it.”

Colbert launched into his Trump impression: “And it’s gonna be great. Do not be alarmed that the forest has begun to reclaim the White House. And I know there’s no one in this tiny room but me and the cameraman right there, but we’ve made sure to crank up this giant mic so that it covers my waddle.

“I’m not sure what the emergency was here other than his poll numbers, because he just played the old hits,” he explained, including transphobia, crime and “words such as that just absolutely forbidden”.

“Yes, words such as ‘that’ were absolutely forbidden,” Colbert mocked. “Under Biden you couldn’t say ‘that’. You had to say ‘this, but over there’. But under Donald Trump we’re finally saying ‘Merry That-mas’ again.

“It seems like even Trump might have felt uncertain about his performance,” he continued, because after the combative address, the president reportedly turned to the press and said: “You think that’s easy?”

“Giving that speech? Yeah, I do,” Colbert responded. “Watching it, on the other hand …”