With most late-night hosts on vacation, Jimmy Kimmel celebrates the end of Elon Musk’s term in Washington and riffs on the new Taco nickname for Donald Trump.
Jimmy Kimmel
Jimmy Kimmel celebrated a big announcement on Thursday evening: Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s head of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), posted on X that he would officially step down from his post and leave Washington DC. “We’re just happy that your time as a special government employee has come to an end,” Kimmel said.
“Elon had a remarkable 130-day stint in government,” he continued, speaking of Musk’s highly controversial and much-loathed stint of firing civil service workers. “He came, he chainsawed, we bled, he left. When he started, he promised to save us a trillion dollars, now he says Doge will probably only save about $160bn. Or as most everyone else says, he probably cost us hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Officials from the Internal Revenue Service have said that cuts at the agency will result in a minimum of $500bn in uncollected taxes this year. “But here’s the thing: politics isn’t about money,” said Kimmel. “It isn’t about success, it’s not about failure. It’s about the lives of the civil servants you destroy along the way. That’s what is most important.”
“And Elon promised that Doge’s work will go on,” he added. “Similar to how the empire continued killing ewoks after the emperor died.”
Now that he has left Washington, Musk can “return to his primary job”, Kimmel said, “which is destroying companies and inseminating every woman in sight”.
And it creates a problem for Trump, as he “doesn’t have anybody to take the blame for him anymore”.
Trump is currently blaming the Court of International Trade, which ruled unanimously this week that he does not have the authority to enact his so-called “reciprocal tariffs” on most countries. “The DoJ claims that stopping these tariffs would take away Trump’s leverage in trade negotiations and embolden other countries to take advantage of them,” Kimmel explained. “Basically, the court pulled down his pants and showed China his little mushroom, and they’re mad.”
Since taking office in January, Trump has changed his tariffs policy more than 50 times, “as any stable genius would”, Kimmel quipped. The flip-flopping has led to a nickname making the rounds on Wall Street: Taco, an acronym for Trump Always Chickens Out. “You’re not going to believe it – he doesn’t like the nickname at all,” Kimmel laughed.
But it seems to be catching on, at least according to Kimmel’s search of Taco-themed AI images on social media. “How does it feel to be on the other end of the nickname game?” Kimmel wondered. “Not great, does it? The only thing that would make it worse is if somebody changed the lyrics to a song by his beloved Village People to drive it home.” And with that, Kimmel introduced a Trump montage featuring “Taco Man” to the tune of Macho Man.
