Jimmy Kimmel on the midterms: ‘We can’t have an election soon enough’

Late-night hosts covered alarming new comments by Donald Trump as well as his outburst at a heckler in Michigan.

Jimmy Kimmel

On Jimmy Kimmel Live! the host said that in the first two weeks of 2026, “all hell has broken loose” and “if this was Jenga, there’d be blocks of wood all over the house.”

He spoke about Trump threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act as a result of his ICE officers causing chaos in Minneapolis. Kimmel joked that “he hasn’t been able to get an insurrection for years”.

The host said that instead of trying to de-escalate the situation, he is doing the opposite and that “he turns the temperature up on everything but his wife.”

Trump has claimed that there are paid protesters only because it is “incomprehensible to him” that people would do something for a reason other than money.

Kimmel also joked that protesting is a “hot new job sector right now”.

In a new interview with Reuters, Trump commented about skipping the next election as he is clearly aware that Republicans will probably lose the midterms at the end of the year.

“We can’t have an election soon enough,” Kimmel said to applause.

Kimmel said it was “disturbing even for him”, although his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has claimed he was joking and was just saying it facetiously. Kimmel said that is “a word he can neither spell nor define”.

Trump has also unveiled his so-called “great healthcare plan” but with few details because Kimmel said “there are none”. He has said that some prices would go down up to 500%, which led to Kimmel reminding viewers that it is “mathematically impossible to slash prices by more than 100%”.

He added: “This is what happens when your dad buys you your business degree.”

Kimmel also spoke about the Venezeualan opposition leader María Corina Machado giving her Nobel peace prize to Trump and how he is probably now “sucking on it like a pacifier”.

He said giving him an award is “the only way to get him to do anything” so he made an offer: if Trump gets ICE out of Minneapolis, he will donate one of his trophies.

Stephen Colbert

On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert spoke about Minnesota being “under siege by masked armed goons victimising American citizens” and also brought up how Trump has threatened the Insurrection Act.

“Well, that’ll calm everybody down,” he said.

Colbert said that Trump and his ICE officers were “inflaming the population with their fear tactics and their violence” and that many of them had “no idea what they’re doing”.

A report has shown that the hiring of 10,000 new agents saw an error in the application process, which meant that many of them were put into place without proper training.

He also expressed shock that the maximum training required was only eight weeks.

Trump is also continuing his threat of taking over Greenland, which has led Nato to get involved and Germany sending troops to help. Colbert said that it’s the first time someone has said “good news, the German troops are on the way”.

Germany is only sending 13 soldiers, to which Colbert joked: “That’s because of German efficiency.”

Colbert also spoke about Machado presenting Trump with her prize. “That is so sad and so meaningless because he didn’t earn it!” he said.

Seth Meyers

On Late Night, Seth Meyers spoke about how Trump’s “approval rating has been “underwater for months” and showed a montage of the many times he has been booed in the past year.

This week saw him heckled at a Ford plant in Michigan, with a worker calling him a “pedophile protector”. The president responded with a middle finger and expletives.

Meyers said it was weird that that particular putdown had Trump immediately think: “Oh, he’s talking to me!”

He also played a montage of Trump swearing and said: “Trump curses so much he sounds like me watching Trump.”

While grocery prices have been rising, the secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, was ridiculed this week for claiming that for $3 an American could assemble a meal from a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, one corn tortilla and “one other thing”.

Meyers said that the something else would be “a single french fry you have to wrestle away from a pigeon” and that it also sounded like “a meal aliens would bring to your cell after they abduct you”.

Meanwhile, Trump threw a lavish Great Gatsby-themed party with champagne and truffles. Meyers said that given how short the book is, “how did none of these people make it to the ending?”