Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Grand jury is leaving us hanging like Trump tried to do with Pence’

Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel lamented the still pending possible arrest of Donald Trump for campaign finance violations, which will remain unclear as they are now on break. The grand jury’s two-week hiatus is “leaving us hanging like Trump tried to do with Mike Pence”, Kimmel quipped. “But that’s a different indictment, I think.”

Trump, meanwhile, has tried to court some favor from the anonymous jurors, posting on Truth Social: “I HAVE GAINED SUCH RESPECT FOR THIS GRAND JURY.”

“And I’ll tell you, if that isn’t the saddest damn thing I have ever read,” said Kimmel. “The great and powerful Donald Trump, weakly kissing the all caps asses of people he will never meet in a last-ditch hope he might somehow flatter them just enough to let him off the hook. I haven’t seen anything this pathetic since he asked Stormy to spank him with a Forbes magazine.”

It was reported earlier this week that the grand jury would call David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid and a longtime Trump associate, to the stand as the final witness. “Which is kind of poetic, if you think about it,” said Kimmel. “This started with a pecker and now it might end with one.”

Stephen Colbert

On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert reported on a different grand jury which has ordered Mike Pence to testify about Trump’s actions on January 6, and specifically what Trump told Pence in an effort to persuade him to attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. It’s already been reported that the ex-president told Pence: “You can either go down in history as a patriot or you can go down in history as a pussy.”

“To which Pence replied: what’s that?” Colbert joked.

“One reason this case may never come to court is that America may cease to exist,” Colbert continued, as congressional Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling, risking a 5 June deadline to avoid “catastrophic default”.

“Now, I’m sure that’s not good, but at this point aren’t we all a little catastrophied out?” Colbert mused. “If you want to grab our attention at this point, you’re going to have to do more. You’re going to need something scarier than catastrophic default, like gonorrhea-geddon or Please Welcome Kanye West.”

Biden has proposed a budget, which has been met with crickets by the speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, who on Tuesday sent the president a “blame letter” claiming “with each passing day, I am incredibly concerned that you are putting an already fragile economy in jeopardy.”

“No you’re not,” said Colbert. “You know how I know you’re not concerned? Because you expressed your concern in the form of the slowest possible form of a communication, a letter. That’s like saying, ‘Oh no! The house is on fire. Quick, someone hire a barbershop quartet to tell the fire department!’”

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Seth Meyers

And on Late Night, Seth Meyers relished Trump’s attacks on his main rival for the GOP nomination, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis. In an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity, Trump claimed DeSantis begged for his endorsement in 2018 and that if he hadn’t given it, DeSantis would be “working either in a pizza parlor place or a law office right now”.

“You know Trump is a New Yorker because the only two professions he could think of are pizza parlor and law office,” Meyers joked. “Although Trump has clearly never been inside a pizza place himself given that he refers to it as a pizza parlor place.

“Fox have put themselves in a situation where they’ve tied their financial and political success to Trump and his base – a base they helped create,” Meyers later added of the beleaguered network. “But now that Trump is under multiple criminal investigations and has tanked the GOP in those three successive national elections, Fox is gently trying to nudge their audience toward DeSantis without pissing them off.”

This included the Fox commentator and former congressman Jason Chaffetz, who called Trump’s interview with Hannity “terrible” and said, “he’s the former president of the United States! Act like it!”

“I’m sorry, which Donald Trump were you expecting – the Donald Trump who whines, complains and plays the victim card, or the Donald Trump who doesn’t fucking exist? Because there’s only the first one,” Meyers retorted. “He’s got two shticks: punching down and playing the victim. That’s it. That’s the whole deal. And as much as the rest of us hate it, for Republican voters, that’s not a negative for Trump.

“That’s why he’s the GOP frontrunner,” he added. “Either these guys still don’t get it or they’re just pretending not to get it because they don’t want to admit that they’ve devoted their lives to a morally and ideologically bankrupt political movement whose main goals are cutting taxes, making it easier for people to get guns and losing their shit over the fact that the green M&M doesn’t give them boner any more.”