Jimmy Kimmel laid into Donald Trump and his administration over their response to the Minneapolis ICE Shooting, accusing the president of twisting the facts from Wednesday’s tragedy.
During Thursday’s monologue for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” the late night host addressed the death of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, who was fatally shot by an ICE agent while she was behind the wheel of her car.
“This is one of those nights where it’s hard to do a show like this,” Kimmel started off his monologue. “It’s hard to find things to laugh at. And this is one of those nights. You know, terrible things happen every day. Sad things happen — tragedies, cruelty, injustice, etc. And in most situations, it’s just a bad part of life. But what do you do when something terrible happens and a big group of people, including those who are running our country, tells you it didn’t?”
As Kimmel went on, he accused the Trump administration of telling Americans that they’re “not seeing what you clearly see.”
He added: “Are you supposed to just accept it and move on? Go about your day. What do we do?”
Kimmel then implored his viewers to watch the video of Good’s death, defending “it’s important for us to know what happened.”
“There used to be a baseline of truth that doesn’t seem to exist anymore,” Kimmel lamented. “And there used to be a baseline of decency. Like, when let’s say a beloved director and his wife [Rob and Michele Reiner] were murdered allegedly by their own son, a leader would either say something nice or say nothing at all. And those days are gone.”
Kimmel then put the White House and conservative media on blast for seemingly supporting “anything and everything their leader says and does.”
“[They’re] trying to convince us that a mom who just dropped her six-year-old off at school was part of a left-wing terror effort,” he said before cutting to footage of Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, United States Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Fox News’ Jesse Watters villainizing Good in the wake of the shooting.
Yet, as Kimmel noted, those people were simply taking “their cues from the president.” On Wednesday, Trump took to Truth Social and wrote, “The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.”
However, Emily Heller, who captured Wednesday’s Minneapolis ICE shooting on camera, later told told CNN’s Erin Burnett the “self defense” narrative was “absolutely not what happened.”
Kimmel also slammed the “self defense” rhetoric, adding, “I don’t think anyone with eyes other than [Trump] would make that claim … This unarmed mom, a devout Christian, by the way, who had no criminal record, driving a Honda Pilot trying to get away from armed men in masks in the snow. Masked men were screaming at her. Weird to believe this woman was a terrorist committing a terrorist act.”
Regarding Noem’s claim that the ICE agent followed his training by shooting at Good, Kimmel blasted the defense as “an insult to every law enforcement officer everywhere,” stating the incident was far from being “by the book.”
He bitingly asked: “How stupid do you think we are?”
Watch Kimmel’s full monologue above.
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. ET on ABC.
