Like everybody else in late night on Monday, Jimmy Kimmel had a tall task to accomplish during his “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” monologue: he attempted to figure out what in the world Rudy Giuliani was trying to tell George Stephanopoulos about the Donald Trump-Michael Cohen-Stormy Daniels situation on Sunday. But after a couple minutes of trying, Kimmel eventually had to give up
“Did you hear about that very old, very scary volcano that erupted over the weekend? Well, his name is Rudy Giuliani,” Kimmel joked to open the monologue. “He was mayor of New York at one time and he is a lawyer now, and spokesperson for Donald Trump.”
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” then played a supercut of Giuliani making crazy eyes during the Stephanopoulos interview, but every time it cut, the shot zoomed in closer to said crazy eyes. This bit alone is worth watching the clip above.
“If that doesn’t give you nightmares, I give up,” Kimmel said.
“After 36 hours of wild, freewheeling, almost unhinged interviews on the president’s behalf last week — during which he directly contradicted statements the president made about the payment to Stormy Daniels — to the point where the president himself had to say Giuliani is new, he doesn’t know all the facts — what did Giuliani do? He went out for a whole new round of interviews this weekend. He had a chat with George Stephanopoulos yesterday – that finally cleared everything up once and for all.”
Kimmel then played the clip from the Stephanopoulos interview in which Giuliani tried to walk back his comments from last week that Trump definitely knew that Cohen paid off Daniels and also reimburse him for the expense: “Can’t say that. At some point, yes, but it could have been recently, it could have been awhile back. Those are the facts that we’re still working on and that, you know, maybe in a little bit of dispute. This is more rumor than it is anything else.”
After Stephanopoulos pointed out that Giuliani himself was the one who made the claim in the first place, Giuliani replied: “Well, maybe I did. But right now, I’m at the point where I’m learning. And I can’t prove that. I can just say it’s rumored. I can prove it’s rumor. But I can’t prove it’s fact”
“I’ve got to tell you, I don’t know what he was trying to say. Let’s look at this closely,” Kimmel said, before having his sidekick Guillermo roll out a chalkboard with those quotes on it. After going through it again, Kimmel gave up on the whole thing. “I could go over this two dozen more times and it wouldn’t make any difference.
While Kimmel failed to make sense of the quote, he did propose a theory for what Giuliani was actually doing.
“I think I know what’s going on here. I think their strategy right now is to put someone out there who is even nuttier than Trump. To make him look normal, by comparison,” Kimmel said.
“And it’s working.”
You can watch this portion of Kimmel’s monologue from Monday night in the video embedded at the top of this post.