Jimmy Kimmel began his monologue Monday night by talking about March Madness — the NCAA basketball tournament bracket was set on Sunday and will be a pretty big deal over the next three weekends. But it seemed as though he only was talking about that so he could smoothly segue into mocking Donald Trump’s speech in Pennsylvania on Saturday night.
“Speaking of madness, I don’t know if you saw President Trump’s new Netflix comedy special that came out on Saturday. But the president went way off script at a rally in Pittsburgh Saturday night. He was supposed to be promoting a Republican candidate for Congress there. But as is usually the case he spent most of the time talking about himself,” Kimmel said, before mentioning how he credited himself for the success of the Winter Olympics in South Korea and said he was better looking than Conor Lamb, the Democratic opponent to the Republican Trump was there to endorse.
“It’s why he has to beat the porn stars off with a stick. He’s very good-looking. And perhaps most significantly, the president cursed the host of ‘Meet the Press,’ Chuck Todd from NBC,” Kimmel said, referring to the part of Trump’s speech where he referred to Todd as a “sleeping son of a bitch.”
“He’s a sleeping son of a bitch? Then what is your friend Ben Carson? Methuselah? Next morning not only does Chuck Todd has have to get up early to host ‘Meet the Press,’ he has to get up even earlier because it’s Daylight Saving Time. but he did manage to stay awake long enough to ask Trump’s secretary of the treasury if he thought the president’s language was appropriate for an all-ages audience.”
The show then played a clip of Secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin telling Todd on “Meet the Press” that he thought it was okay because the comments came “in the context of a campaign rally.”
“A campaign rally. Does Trump know it’s not time to start campaign rallying yet? It’s March of 2018. But that’s the thing: Donald Trump loves running for president. He just doesn’t like being the president. He can’t wait to get back on that campaign trail. He encourages supporters in the crowd to, quote, vote like crazy. Which is really the only way you can vote for Donald Trump,” Kimmel joked.
“And he even revealed his next campaign slogan. For real. His slogan for 2020 is ‘Keep America Great’ with an exclamation point. And if history has shown us anything, it’s that nothing propels a campaign to success quite like an exclamation point,” Kimmel said as an image of Jeb Bush’s infamous “Jeb!” logo appeared on screen. “Keep America Great. At this point, it seems like the entirety of his governing philosophy is ‘Will it fit on a hat I can sell to people?’
Kimmel then ended this portion of his monologue with a new edition of “Drunk Donald Trump,” in which the show plays a slowed down clip of him speaking. In this case, it was from the part of his speech on Saturday in which he was jokingly trying to appear “presidential.”
You can watch this segment of Kimmel’s Monday monologue in the video at the top of this post.