Kimmel: ‘We Now Know Beyond a Treasonable Doubt’ That Putin Is Blackmailing Trump
There was exactly one topic on the minds of late-night hosts on Monday: Donald Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin that left most everybody in the United States, including many high profile Republicans, pretty upset. And so Jimmy Kimmel, of course, led with this topic on his “Jimmy Kimmel Live” monologue on Monday night.
“Today was maybe the strangest of all 542 bizarre days of Donald Trump’s reign of error. Today may have been the weirdest,” Kimmel said. To help measure the weirdness, Kimmel used Trump’s pratfall-filled meeting with the Queen of England as the control, playing the clip of Trump inexplicably standing in front of her.
“But that turned out to be nothing compared to what happened in Finland this morning. Helsinki has frozen over,” Kimmel continued. “The president of the United States today publicly sided with Russia over our own FBI on the subject of cyber attacks on our election campaign. Trump had a meeting today with his KGBFF, Vladimir Putin, and in an interview with CBS yesterday he said he was going into this meeting with low expectations. We all were.
“So Trump and Putin met one on one with only their interpreters in the room for more than two hours. Reportedly, Trump wanted to meet with Putin alone because he didn’t want his advisers to see him naked, which is natural. And we probably should have known how this was going to go based on this because right off the bat you see here Trump gives Putin — he looks over at him as they sit down in front of the media and gives him a little wink. Yeah, there you go. That’s the ‘thanks for keeping that tape between us guys’ wink.”
Kimmel then remarked that “things got odder from there” before the show played a clip of Trump trying to provide “historical context” for the meeting in which he said the following:
“Our nations fought alongside one another in the Second World War. Even during the tensions of the Cold War, when the world looked much different than it does today, the United States and Russia were able to maintain a strong dialogue. But our relationship has never been worse than it is now. However, that changed, as of about four hours ago. I really believe that.”
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“I’m sure you do. No one else does but you definitely do,” Kimmel said. “Is it possible Vladimir Putin brought a hypnotist to that meeting instead of a translator? Because this is what got people really fired up today. After all this tough talk, when Trump was asked to weigh in on Russia’s role as hack master in the 2016 election, something the FBI, the justice department, even Trump’s own secretary of state says happened without question — when Trump finally had the chance to publicly castigate Putin for trying to disrupt our democracy, this is what our commander in chief chose to do.”
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” then played the clip from Trump’s press conference with Putin in which Trump was if he wanted to say something publicly to Putin about Russia’s interference with American elections. To which Trump said: “All I can do is ask the question. My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
“Well, I guess that settles it,” Kimmel said. “There you go. If you’re wondering whether or not Vladimir Putin has an incriminating video of Donald Trump, we now know beyond a treasonable doubt that he does. He better.
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“This wasn’t a good day for Donald Trump. we haven’t seen an American so owned by a Russian since ‘Rocky IV.’ “
You can watch Kimmel’s monologue from Monday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” in the video embedded at the top of this post.
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