Stephen Colbert was not the only late-night host to express anger and outrage over President Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election results. On Jimmy Kimmel Live, host Jimmy Kimmel also went hard after the president for his speech at the White House on Thursday night, which Kimmel said was Trump’s latest attempt at “choking democracy to death.”
“I’d like to provide the American people with an update on our efforts to protect the integrity of our very important 2020 election. If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Trump said falsely on Thursday night. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.”
His speech was so filled with groundless allegations that ABC, CBS, and NBC all stopped broadcasting the comments before Trump was finished. “We have to interrupt here, because the president made a number of false statements, including the notion that there has been fraudulent voting,” Lester Holt said on NBC. “There has been no evidence of that.”
“That’s a different type of concession speech,” Kimmel joked on his late-night show. “I won’t bore you or give him the pleasure of showing what he said tonight, but the only thing he didn’t do was pull off his wig and reveal that he’s been Vlad Putin all along.”
He added, “It was a litany of lies, threats—just a despicable and incoherent attack on democracy and the United States. At the end of that speech, he should have been arrested. If they could find handcuffs small enough to take him away, they would have.”
Trump and his allies have tried to claim that a mass conspiracy of voter fraud in key states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia is responsible for him trailing Joe Biden in the election results. While Trump has not provided any proof for his claims, the president has initiated lawsuits in many states—but so far, those legal efforts have failed.
“I really cannot think of a more fitting ending to Trump’s presidency than him suing America,” Kimmel joked. “We should be suing him is what should be happening.”
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