Jimmy Kimmel: I'm Too Important to Leave the Country

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The opening to Jimmy Kimmel’s show last night was a skit about him leaving the country followed by a long monologue in which he broke into tears at one point. If you’re looking for the ultimately example of a self-absorbed Hollywood liberal, this is it.

The show opens with Kimmel packing his backs to leave the country because he’s pretty certain he’s on Trump’s enemies list. His sidekick Guillermo Rodriguez enters to literally smack some sense back into him. “Jimmy we need you. We need you to help us get through this,” Rodriguez says after slapping Kimmel in the face. He adds, “You have a very important voice.”

“I do?” Kimmel asks as if he didn’t help write this awkward script.

After a moment of reconsideration, Kimmel changes his tune. “You’re right. I need to stay here. We have unfinished business.”

From there the show shifts to a ten minute monologue about the election. “This Donald Trump he’s like the Emperor from Star Wars. He’s old, he’s evil and he keeps coming back with no reasonable explanation whatsoever,” Kimmel said.

He then made it personal. “Those of you who are hate-watching this show right now wanting to watch me suffer, you will be happy to know there was no joy in Muddville last night,” he said. He painted a picture of his kids, including his 7-year-old son, cursing as they learned that Trump had won the election. This brought a round of cheers and whoops from the audience.

After a few more minutes, Kimmel got to the core of his message. “Let’s be honest it was a terrible night last night,” he said. He continued, “It was a terrible night for women, for children, for the hundreds of thousands of hardworking immigrants who make this country go.” And at this point he started to break into tears.

Toward the end of his monologue, Kimmel tried to look for something positive to say but really came up empty. “I hope his next unpredictable act is to reach across the aisle and do something positive,” he said.

Kimmel then asked his audience how many of them had stopped speaking to a relative as a result of the election. Quite a few raised their hands but Kimmel said it was fewer than he expected. He then introduced his cousin as a substitute relative for anyone who was feeling the loss. The segment ended with a series of man-on-the street interviews with people who clearly didn’t know that the election had already happened. The point of this was that a lot of people just don’t care about the election but also that a lot of people who don’t care are just dumb.

After all of this intro, Kimmel’s main guests for the night were the co-hosts of Pod Save America, the liberal podcast created several years ago by former Obama staffers. They joked out of the gate that they’d agreed to appear before the election and the loss. Obviously this wasn’t the upbeat celebration they had hoped to have on the show.

There was one interesting moment in the discussion when Kimmel asked them when they knew things were turning in Trump’s favor. One of them replied it was when Osceola county in Florida, which is majority Hispanic, went 14 points more for Trump than it had previously. “That was the warning sign that something was afoot and certainly that the joke at Madison Square Garden was not going to win us the election.”

“There were a lot of people who felt that that joke was a turning point of some kind,” Kimmel said. “Did you feel like that turned out to be entirely a media creation?” he asked. All of the hosts agreed. I wonder if Kimmel was one of those people pushing the joke as a reason Trump should lose.