‘The wheels are off the wagon’: Kimmel reacts to Trump’s bizarre news conference
WHEN Jimmy Kimmel walked onto the set of his late-night show on Wednesday, President Donald Trump had just wrapped up what the comic described as “a rambling, angry, jumbled, dishonest, and frequently incoherent hour and 20-minutelong press conference.” Or had he? “It might still be going,” Kimmel acknowledged. “I don’t even know where to start.”
It was a common sentiment among late-night hosts. Over the course of 81 minutes, the president had called the sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh a “con job” cooked up by Democrats, described his own brain as “very, very large,” addressed a Kurdish reporter as “Mr. Kurd,” and suggested that George Washington “may have had a bad past.” Even veteran entertainers were at a loss for words.
Encouraging viewers to watch the news conference for themselves “with someone you love,” Stephen Colbert described it as “a shambling mess.” Seth Meyers said that it had gone “off the rails.” Trevor Noah called it “the wildest incoherent ramblings of words put together.”
“The wheels are off the wagon,” Kimmel said. “It’s time to put grandpa in an assisted living facility, because he cannot care for himself.”
He added: “You know how they said that ( Deputy Attorney General) Rod Rosenstein wanted to tape him to show everyone that he’s nuts? Not necessary. He did it himself.”
The president’s rare solo news conference followed the news that three women had come forward to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct.
Kavanaugh has denied the allegations, and Trump claimed that Democrats were simply trying to block his nominee from being confi rmed to the high court.
“They’re actually con artistes because they know how quality this man is, and they’ve destroyed a man’s reputation and they want to destroy it even more,” said the president on Wednesday, calling the accusations “a big, fat con job.”
That particular turn of phrase resonated with comics, who saw it as more applicable to the president himself.
“I’m pretty sure those were the results from Trump’s physical,” Meyers quipped on NBC. On CBS, Colbert suggested that “a big, fat con job” would make a good slogan for Trump’s 2020 campaign.
During the news conference, Trump argued that anyone he nominated for the Supreme Court would face opposition from Democrats — even the nation’s fi rst president.
“Look, if we brought George Washington here and we said, we have George Washington, the Democrats would vote against him,” he said. “Just so you understand. And he may have had a bad past, who knows, you know? He may have had some, I think, accusations made. Didn’t he have a couple of things in his past?”
In fact, as Noah pointed out on Comedy Central, Washington was indeed a slave owner.
“I would hope that someone would ask him, ‘Now it says here that you have 300 slaves?’” Noah said. “By today’s standards, you would hope that the person wouldn’t get confi rmed.”
In yet another hypothetical scenario, Trump had claimed that if he nominated a woman for the Supreme Court, she “could have charges made from many years ago also.” It’s a situation that Noah described as “highly unlikely.”
“At the same time, I feel like Trump is the one person who would nominate the one woman who has multiple sexual assaults against her,” Noah said.
Referencing the president’s tendency to drag previously obscure fi gures into his orbit and place them at the centre of a national controversy, Noah said that the president “has this insane and innate talent for destroying people’s lives when he vouches for them.”
Noah suggested that’s exactly what’s happening with Kavanaugh.
“Brett Kavanaugh went from being the guy whom no one knew anything about, to people from his college and high school coming out because of the story of him being a saint,” he said.
The Comedy Central host predicted that people will now start digging into Washington’s past, too.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if George Washington gets removed from Mount Rushmore because of Trump,” Noah said.
The president’s bizarre behaviour provided plenty of material, but it did present one challenge for comics: His performance at the news conference was hard to top.
“They could easily have sold this thing to Netflix as a comedy special,” Kimmel said. — WPBloomberg