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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Entertainment
Guardian staff

Jimmy Kimmel on Donald Trump: ‘His legal problems are based on him being an idiot’

Jimmy Kimmel on Trump: “In every case, the reason he’s in trouble is because he is the dumbest criminal in the world.”
Jimmy Kimmel on Trump: ‘In every case, the reason he’s in trouble is because he is the dumbest criminal in the world.’ Photograph: YouTube

Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel looked forward to a possible indictment of Donald Trump, after the former president claimed that he expected to be arrested on Tuesday for campaign finance violations in relation to 2016 hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels.

“But you never know with him,” said Kimmel. “Either he’s about to actually be arrested, or he’s releasing another round of digital trading cards for us to buy, we don’t know for sure.”

“He’s absolutely spinning out, because he knows it’s Melania’s birthday next month and she might finally get her wish,” he joked.

Meanwhile, Mike Pence weighed in on the possible arrest with what Kimmel described as “words that are so profoundly meaningless, even if you were to print them out, you’d still have a blank page”.

“Nobody’s above the law, but nobody is beneath the law either,” Pence said on ABC’s This Week.

Kimmel mulled that over: “has somebody been gnawing on Mother’s scented candles again? Because that doesn’t make any sense at all,” he said.

Even his GOP presidential rival and Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, defended Trump but also “slipped in a little zinger” at the ex-president’s expense: “Look, I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair – I can’t speak to that.

“Well, it’s Ron DeSassy all of a sudden,” Kimmel laughed.

“The truth is, there’s no good reason for Trump to be in any of this trouble,” Kimmel summarized. “If Casa No-brain had just paid Stormy Daniels the $130,000 himself out of his Pizza Hut money or whatever, he wouldn’t be in this situation. He wouldn’t have an issue in New York.

“So many of his legal problems are based on him being an idiot,” he added. “If President Karen hadn’t picked up the phone and called around Georgia asking to speak to its manager to find 11,000 votes, he wouldn’t have an issue in Georgia. If he just tweeted the words ‘calm down, go home’ four hours earlier, like everyone including his daughters told him to, he wouldn’t have an issue on January 6.

“And if the Great White Hope Chest hadn’t boxed up his love letters from the Saudis and Kim Jong-un – if he hadn’t squirreled them out of the White House and into the rec room at Golf-a-Lago – he wouldn’t have an issue with the FBI,” he concluded. “In every case, the reason he’s in trouble is because he is the dumbest criminal in the world.”

Jimmy Fallon

On the Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon also opened with Trump’s expectation of getting arrested for hush money payments. The former president posted on Truth Social, in all caps: “the far & away leading Republican candidate & former president of the United States of America, will be arrested on Tuesday of next week”.

“First of all, at least he’s admitting he’s the former president,” said Fallon. “That’s progress!

“You’ve got to give it to him – it’s not often that someone sends out a save the date for their own arrest,” he added.

“You know, if they want Trump’s fingerprints, they could’ve just looked at the Cheeto prints on his Diet Coke can,” he quipped.

Trump also urged his supporters to “protest, take our nation back!”

“Yeah, even his supporters are thinking, ‘that really worked out well for us last time,’” Fallon joked. “Right now, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are like ‘c’mon, man, we just gave you your accounts back, please!’”

The Daily Show

“I’ve got just one thing to say about that: finally!” said the Daily Show’s guest host, comedian and former senator Al Franken. “And you know what the best thing about it is? It’s happening right here in the greatest city on the planet, New York City!

“Who would ever have thought that Donald Trump would be brought down by a porn star?” he mused. “All of us, right? It was pretty predictable.”

The possible arrest stems from Trump’s payment to Stormy Daniels to keep the story of their affair quiet, “and here we are still talking about it seven years later”, said Franken. “So that would be another failed Trump business venture.”

Heeding his call, some Trump supporters have floated making a human “patriot moat” around Mar-a-Lago to protect the former president. “And I have to ask: who are these people who can just leave whatever they’re doing to go physically protect Donald Trump?” Franken wondered, imagining the logic: “Uh, nurse, you’ll have to find someone else to finish the brain surgery – the president has summoned me to Mar-a-Lago to be a human moat for him.”

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