Jimmy Kimmel
After less than a month online, Donald Trump shut down his “beacon of freedom” blog this week. Senior aide Jason Miller confirmed the demise of the blog, From the Desk of Donald J Trump, in a statement to CNBC.
The end of the website billed as “a place to speak freely and safely” was “a real punch in the gut for me”, Jimmy Kimmel deadpanned on Wednesday night. “He was very excited about this blog for the first month after he was banned on Twitter, and now he’s just abandoning it. It’s a move he calls the Eric.”
The former president reportedly elected to close the site after being roundly mocked for its dismal traffic – a few weeks ago, the Washington Post reported it had attracted a “staggeringly small audience”. “So from now on he’s just going to write bitchy little notes on the dry erase board at the Mar-a-Lago omelet station,” Kimmel joked. “More people will see them.”
Kimmel also touched on an about-face on cannabis from Amazon, which announced support for a federal bill that would decriminalize marijuana and pledged to stop screening workers for THC. “Which kinda sucks for those workers, because the urine test was the only bathroom break they got at Amazon,” Kimmel joked.
“I wonder if they’ll also take a different approach to what they sell,” he added, “because right now if you want to buy a pipe to smoke out of, you have to search ‘creative useful small gadgets’ or ‘portable small tools’. Which makes no sense, because 40% of the stuff people buy on Amazon is because they’re high.”
And finally, Kimmel riffed on some of more chaotic requests lobbed at Dr Anthony Fauci during the height of the Covid storm last spring, drawn from a trove of emails acquired by the Freedom of Information Act and published separately by the Washington Post and BuzzFeed on Tuesday. The emails sent to the top US infectious disease expert included numerous inquiries from celebrities and ordinary people offering advice and asking silly questions, such as whether hydrogen peroxide could be used as a cure, or whether jewelry bought in China could transmit Covid.
“This poor Dr Fauci – the only good thing that happened to him was Brad Pitt playing him on Saturday Night Live,” Kimmel quipped.
