Late-night hosts recapped Donald Trump’s especially weird address at the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon.
Jimmy Kimmel
On his final show before the Thanksgiving holiday, Jimmy Kimmel counted his blessings. “This year, I am most thankful that we only have five weeks left in this year,” he joked on Tuesday evening.
Meanwhile at the White House “the presidential ketchup boat is filled to the brim and ready to go.” On Tuesday, at the “freshly paved over Rose Garden”, the president presided over the annual pardon of the turkeys, “which at this point are the only thing that Trump hasn’t pardoned this year”.
The two lucky birds this year are named Gobble and Waddle, “which is what Trump does every night at dinner”, Kimmel quipped.
“Now most presidents at the turkey pardon keep it light – they do bad puns, they wish everybody a happy Thanksgiving, and they go back to work,” he continued. “But that’s not Donald Trump. Donald Trump used the opportunity to brag about all the wars he’s ending, how low his imaginary prices are now.
“And out of nowhere, took shots at the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois,” calling them, respectively, a “low-IQ person” and a “big fat slob”.
“Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!” Kimmel deadpanned. “I mean, seriously though – he says a lot of crazy stuff. In that same press conference he said there had been no murders in Washington DC in the last six months because of him,” even though, in reality, there have been 62 murders in Washington since he took office. “Which already indicates a vivid imagination,” said Kimmel. “But does he really look at himself in the mirror and go: ‘I am thin. I am so thin I can comment on others who aren’t?’”
Kimmel also touched on the news that Paramount, now owned by Trump’s friend Larry Ellison, will distribute a new Rush Hour movie at Trump’s request. “He likes the Rush Hour movies because that was the last time he got Eric to be quiet for 90 minutes,” Kimmel joked.
The fourth Rush Hour movie had been dead in the water until Trump intervened, because director Bret Ratner had been blacklisted in Hollywood over sexual misconduct allegations, though he is making a theatrical comeback, of sorts, with a documentary on Melania Trump.
“One thing about Melania – she has really good instincts about men,” Kimmel joked. “So for anyone who says that Trump wastes a lot of time on nothing, wrong! We’re getting a Rush Hour 4. And next up, The Cosby Show.”
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers recapped an especially strange edition of the annual turkey pardon. “No matter who the president is, this is a weird tradition,” he noted. “But, as weird as it is, Trump can always make it weirder.”
Meyers played a montage of clips from Trump’s address, in which he claimed last year’s turkey pardons were invalid and rambled about “gang members”, “murders” and called the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, a “big, fat slob”.
“I think those turkeys were standing there being like, ‘Just fucking kill us. Put us out of our misery,’” Meyers joked.
And yet somehow, it “did get weirder”, as Trump went on to say that the secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, had deemed Gobble and Waddle as the first “Maha” (Make America Healthy Again) turkeys, raised on a diet of grass and beef smoothies.
“It definitely sounds like you still plan on eating them,” Meyers quipped, imitating Trump: “We’ve fattened them up for this pardon. And then, of course, the next step, we will baste them for justice.”
