There was exactly one topic on the minds of every late-night host on Thursday: Rudy Giuliani’s appearances on several different Fox News shows to tell everyone over and over again that actually, Donald Trump not only knew that Michael Cohen paid off Stormy Daniels, but also that he reimbursed Cohen for the expense — both things that Cohen and Trump had denied up to that point. And Jimmy Kimmel spent most of his monologue on Thursday night sort of marveling at the whole situation.
“Starting off as we usually do with a new episode of America’s most popular daytime soap ‘What the Hell is Happening in Washington.’ You know, we don’t have ‘Scandal’ on Thursday nights anymore, so the president has been working overtime to fill that hole for us. And boy, did he deliver the goods this week,” Kimmel said.
“We have a new new bombshell in the Stormy Daniels Hussia investigation, thanks to former New York mayor and current Donald Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. This is really something, OK, so you remember how last month a reporter on Air Force One asked Trump if he knew about the $130,000 payment his lawyer Michael Cohen made to Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about the affair they didn’t have and he said he didn’t know about it? Well, now he did know about it.
“And remember how Michael Cohen said he used his own money to make that payment and was never reimbursed by Donald Trump? Well, now he was reimbursed by Donald Trump.”
Kimmel then spent the next several minutes of his monologue going through clips of Giuliani’s appearances on Hannity Wednesday night and “Fox and Friends” on Thursday morning, struggling to believe the whole thing is really happening.
“The President repaid Michael Cohen for the hush money he didn’t know anything about. Which almost makes you think maybe he did know something about it,” Kimmel said. “And he ‘funneled’ it, which doesn’t sound suspicious. That’s how I pay all my porn stars too. Through a funnel.”
Several clips into the sequence, Kimmel’s incredulity about the whole thing reached its peak.
“By the end of the week, Rudy Giuliani is gonna implicate Trump in the Lincoln assassination,” Kimmel quipped.
After several minutes of this, Kimmel presented his theory on what in the world is actually happening here.
“I thought about this, and what I think is happening here is this. Because they can’t be this dumb. They just can’t be this dumb,” Kimmel said. “They know the prosecutors have the files from the raid on Michael Cohen’s office that prove Trump paid Cohen this money. They know that information is gonna come out. So they send Giuliani over to Hannityland to say, ‘Yes, he paid Cohen the money back,’ as if Trump hasn’t been saying ‘I didn’t pay that money all along.
“And then when the evidence does come out proving that Trump did pay off a porn star, they’ll say, ‘Right, that’s what we said! He paid her. We said that.’ And then we’ll all move onto the next thing.”
Kimmel then wrapped up the whole thing with a truly delightful montage of Giuliani making what he called “crazy eyes” during his interview with Hannity. You can see that and the rest of Kimmel’s comments about Giuliani from Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” in the video embedded at the top of this post.