It was still months before the 2016 presidential election that Jimmy Kimmel says an early warning from then-candidate Hillary Clinton stopped him cold.
The late night host was chatting with the former secretary of state on his TV programme when he said her comment about Donald Trump’s presidential prospects left him as surprised as when he heard O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder, according to an interview published on Tuesday with Rolling Stone.
“I said to Hillary during a commercial break, ‘I hope Trump gets the nomination. I think he’ll be a slam-dunk for you,’” he recalled, suggesting that Trump would be an easy candidate for her to beat.
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“And she said, ‘Be careful what you wish for,’” he said, calling that his “Oh, shit, this is serious” moment.
“Listen, when O.J. was found not guilty, I was just absolutely shocked. I had that same feeling. I had this faith in America that was shaken, and I still am not over it. I thought that when it comes down to it, this country, we do the right thing. That’s obviously in the past,” he said.
Kimmel, who today routinely lampoons Trump and his administration on his TV program — reasoning “there’s always material” — said his disillusionment with politics has only grown in recent years.
Rather than hoping he can educate viewers who may not be paying attention to what’s occurring around them, as he may have done a year ago, he said, “Now I see myself more as a place to scream.”
One such early disappointment, he said, was him feeling like he had made headway on his program in 2017 with Senator Bill Cassidy while discussing Republicans’ efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The Louisiana Republican on air assured Kimmel, whose son was born with a congenital heart defect, that any health care bill proposed by his party would pass “the Jimmy Kimmel test.” Kimmel later accused Cassidy of lying to his face.
“When I spoke to Bill Cassidy on the air, I thought, ‘This man is a doctor. He understands this better than most politicians,’ and I felt that he was going to seize that moment and make himself a hero to Americans by doing the right thing, and I was quite surprised that he didn’t,” he told Rolling Stone.
Kimmel said he “will always be grateful” to the late Arizona Senator John McCain for breaking with his party to vote against repealing so-called Obamacare, despite it drawing never-ending scorn from Trump.
It’s that unrelenting vindictiveness that Kimmel said has left Republicans fearful of standing up to Trump. But that’s not to say that he doesn’t think liberals also played a role in giving Trump the power that he has today.
Liberals’ faux outrage and use of cancel culture, particularly when it comes to criticism of comedians, is a “big part” of why Trump was elected a second time, Kimmel said.
“I think a lot of the outrage is completely manufactured, and it’s like, a lot of these people who are angry aren’t really angry. I think these liberals who’ve done such a good job of viciously attacking comedians are a big part of the reason why Trump is the president right now,” he said.
But the biggest reason he thinks Trump beat Kamala Harris, “more than anything,” he said, is that Trump’s a celebrity, “and it’s hard to compete with that.”
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