Jimmy Kimmel was emotional Wednesday night while talking about the shocking, undeniable victory by Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
“Let’s be honest, it was a terrible night last night,” he said. “It was a terrible night for women, for children, for the hundreds of thousands of hard-working immigrants who make this country go, for health care, for our climate, for science, for journalism, for justice, for free speech.”
“It was a terrible night for poor people, for the middle class, for seniors who rely on social security,” Kimmel continued. “For our allies in Ukraine. For NATO. For the truth, and Democracy and decency. And it was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him.
“And guess what?” Kimmel added. “It was a bad night for everyone who voted for him too. You just don’t realize it yet.”
“But,” Kimmel glumly noted, “it was a really good night for Putin. And for polio. And for lovable billionaires like Elon Musk and the bros up in Silicon Valley, and all the wriggling brainworms who sold what was left of their souls to bow down to Donald Trump.”
Then Kimmel reflected on the election’s larger context, coming nearly 4 years after Trump’s attempted coup (for which, inexplicably, the Biden administration never held him accountable). “But you know what? I’m gonna’ say something that Trump would never say, unless it favored him: The people voted. And this is the choice we made.”
“In January, Donald Trump becomes President, and that’s that. He won,” Kimmel said. “Doesn’t mean we give up. But it also doesn’t mean we don’t storm the capitol because we don’t like the result.”
Kimmel pondered the possibility there might be a meager silver lining. “The best thing I can come up with is, we’ve been through this once before. And yes, this time it is probably gonna be worse. Maybe a lot worse. But I also think that maybe we will look back and realize that, in the long run this is what we needed to wake us up.”
“Maybe the people who care so much about him need to find out how little he cares about them.”
“I hope his next unpredictable act is to reach across the aisle and do something positive,” Kimmel added. “He really does, the bars low he has an opportunity to win us over.”
“Maybe this time, he’ll shock us and actually do some productive things. He won’t probably, but he could,” Kimmel acknowledged. “Or maybe the only good part of all this is he can’t run again in 2028. I don’t know.”
As he concluded his commentary, Kimmel aimed for an amusing attempt to explain how it happened.
“Listen, I’m disappointed. I know a lot of you are too. I thought common sense would prevail. I’m so stupid. I always think it’s gonna but for a lot of people, this just isn’t important. It’s not high on their list,” he said.
“There’s evidence that many voters didn’t even realize Joe Biden wasn’t on the ballot anymore. Over the past two days, there was a spike in Google searches for the phrase ‘did Joe Biden drop out?’” he added.
Kimmel told viewers that “the idea that some Americans didn’t know who was running seems so crazy to me, so, we decided to conduct our own, totally unscientific poll. We went out in the street today, and we asked people if they voted -today.”
Then he cued a person-on-the-street video where several people appeared to think the presidential election was on Wednesday instead of Tuesday.
“Alright. Well now I understand,” he quipped.