Anais Gutierrez
Jimmy Kimmel delivered quite a monologue on Tuesday and it’s really nothing to joke about. While Jimmy proposed a plan to cope with the Trump administration, he also delivered a wake-up call to fellow citizens.
Along with Kimmel, other late night hosts expressed their outrage over the President’s comments on the Charlottesville incident and his defense of groups promoting racism, anti-Semitism, and neo-Nazism.
Jimmy Kimmel didn’t hold back on the white supremacy issue
The past weekend’s events in Charlottesville, in which a white nationalist rally ended up in one dead and multiple injuries, sparkled an unmistakable outpouring of comedic rage, for two reasons.
First, the President was so late to condemn the acts; and second, he defended groups promoting things indisputably wrong as racism, anti-Semitism, and neo-Nazism.While. On Monday late-night TV hosts got serious as they talked about the horrific events in Virginia.
Tv figures delivered quite some rants calling out for citizens, condemning hatred acts and asking for President Trump to step up. Jimmy Kimmel didn’t hold back and talked about the catastrofic press conference held on Tuesday, in which Trump stated that there was blame for the violence on “both sides,” the white supremacists and the protesters.
“It was supposed to be a press conference about infrastructure, and it ended with our president making an angry and passionate defense of white supremacists,” he said to his audience.
“I feel like I can say this with reasonable certainty: The president is completely unhinged.”
Kimmel also called out and criticized Trump’s remarks on being good people “on both sides.”
“If you’re with a group of people and they’re chanting things like ‘Jews will not replace us’ and you don’t immediately leave that group, you are not a very fine person,” he said.
At one point, Kimmel directly addressed Trump voters and said he understood that some people vote him considering he’d shake up politics, but that it’s now time to face reality and admit he’s gotta go.
“You pick a horse; it’s 35 to 1 and it pays off!,” he said.
“You’ve been trying to ignore it — because you don’t want to admit — that these smug, annoying liberals — were right! It’s the last thing you want to do.” “But the truth is — and deep down inside you know you made a mistake, you know this is true — you made a mistake. You picked the wrong guy.”
Trump’s response outraged the whole country
“President Trump this afternoon gave a press conference that can only be described as clinically insane. You know that list of side effects at the end of a pharmaceutical ad?,“ said Seth Meyers. “He apparently has all of them. He said among other things that ‘there were very fine people on both sides’ of the events in Charlottesville.”
Stephen Colbert also jumped right in holding anything back.
“It took Donald Trump two days to condemn the white nationalists and the neo-Nazis who held that rally down in Charlottesville. But even though many criticized how long it took,” he said. “The president knew the right thing was to make the statement Monday, be clear about who was to blame, and then move on to the people’s business,” he deadpanned.
“I’m just kidding. He held a press conference today in, I believe, the seventh circle of hell.”
Even Jimmy Fallon, who’s been criticized for being too soft on Trump, felt compelled on this occasion to speak out in a way he has not before on his show.
In what amounted to a separate address to his viewers before his monologue Monday night, Fallon declared that his young daughters, like all young people in the country, need leaders to look up to, “and the fact that this President took two days to clearly denounce racism and white supremacy was shameful.”
No joke here, but serious talk
Late-night hosts have on numerous occasions of national trauma taken a moment to address their viewers in a heartfelt way, as they all did after the 9/11 attacks. And, for six months, late-night hosts have pilloried the President for a long litany of incidents ripe for satire, from shoving a prime minister out of the way to attacking his own attorney general.
However, Tuesday’s episode of the hosts’ rants is a huge escalation on how they criticize the administration, not only for the emotional way they did it but for what they said.
Late night shows have evolved into something else, they’re not longer meant to make political jokes meant to laughs, now they seem to follow a purpose.
Not only they do real political commentary but make a difference, change opinions and even shape public discourse.
Source: Chicago Tribune
