Jimmy Kimmel made his “closing argument” ahead of the 2024 election on his eponymous ABC late-night show on Monday.
In it, delivered at the end of his monologue on Monday, he urged viewers to “move on already” from Donald Trump, who he likened to a “cancerous polyp” on “our collective national colon.”
Telling people to vote, Kimmel painted a picture of a future in which the Republican presidential candidate no longer dominated the news cycle.
“Forget about what side you’re on. I want you to take just take a moment to imagine a world in which you wake up in the morning, you check the news, and no one says the words ‘Donald’ or ‘Trump,’” he said. “Just a bunch of normal, boring stuff. Wouldn’t that be nice? No lawn signs. No red hats. No arguing with your grandfather. You check the sports, Al Roker does the weather, off to work you go.”
Earlier, the Jimmy Kimmel Live! host recapped memorable moments from Trump and Harris’ campaigns over the weekend and, much like his fellow late-night hosts Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert, lamented how the close polls show that “nobody knows anything!”
Though Kimmel acknowledged that much like the pollsters, he doesn’t “know anything,” he did say that “Team Harris does appear to have momentum” in the weekend before Election Day.
Noting how Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Dick Cheney have all expressed their support for Harris, Kimmel joked, “Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Darth Vader: This is one helluva rebel alliance.”
As for Trump, Kimmel picked out some choice moments from a weekend of rallies, including the former president talking about having guns aimed at Liz Cheney, that he “shouldn’t have left” office after losing the 2020 election, saying polls he doesn’t like should be illegal and, while speaking about the bulletproof glass at his rallies after the assassination attempt against him in July, that he doesn’t mind if people shoot through the media.
Kimmel also highlighted “bombshell audio,” published by The Daily Beast, in which Jeffrey Epstein, speaking with Michael Wolff, says he was Trump’s “closest friend for 10 years.”
Beyond that, Kimmel summarized, “Epstein said Trump told him he likes to have sex with the wives of his best friends. To the point where Epstein described Trump as having no moral compass. Do you know what kind of lowlife you have to be for Jeffrey Epstein to say you have no moral? It’s like if R. Kelly got mad at you for leaving the toilet seat up.”
And Kimmel was shocked that the audio didn’t make more headlines.
“This barely moves the needle,” Kimmel said. “Remember Mitt Romney went down because he put a dog carrier on the roof of his car? We just got a hundred hours of Jeffrey Epstein saying he and Trump were BFFs. I didn’t even get an alert about it on my phone. I got no texts on this.”
Earlier, Kimmel compared the anxiety around finding out who would be the next president to “waiting to get the results of a biopsy.”
On the polls, Kimmel said, “There are only two choices. You have a 50 percent chance of being right. It’s not like you picked the Trifecta at the Belmont Stakes. There’s no magic involved. It’s heads or tails. At the end of this, the pollsters who were wrong will quietly disappear – the other ones will be like, ‘I told ya, one percent!’ What did you tell us? You called 800 losers who didn’t have enough sense to not answer an unknown call. That’s all you did.”
Later, he added, “We don’t know anything. But we let these polls dictate whether we feel like throwing up or not. It’s dumb. We’re dumb. And after tomorrow, we’re gonna find out exactly how dumb we are!”