Jimmy Kimmel on Trump’s midterms mindset: ‘If his side wins, elections were honest’

Late-night hosts looked into Republicans’ efforts to discredit election results ahead of the US midterms and Donald Trump Jr’s questionable friendship with a Putin-aligned oligarch.

Jimmy Kimmel

On Tuesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host opened with the latest wrinkle in a scandal involving the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, and Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch who paid for some of the cost of renting a private island and staging a fireworks display for Don Jr’s Bahamas wedding in May.

The latest report is that in August, “DJTJ and his bro-ligarch went on a hunting trip together to Mongolia”, Kimmel explained. During the trip, Trump’s son reportedly shot and killed an Altai argali, the largest sheep in the world that is also an endangered species, “so of course Junior jetted in to kill it, as is the Trump way”.

“But the bigger issue is, this buddy of his is a close friend of Putin,” Kimmel continued. “The son of an American president is pal-ing around Mongolia with a known Russian security asset. It raises very serious concerns about counter-intelligence.

“And if you think about it, pretty much everything the Trumps do is counter to intelligence.”

Kimmel offered a theory on the questionable relationship: “I believe this whole thing – the wedding, the hunting, all of it – is a big conspiracy cooked up to make it look like Don Jr has a friend.”

Kimmel then turned to next week’s midterms, “which will decide whether the Republicans maintain control of Congress or whether it was stolen by a caravan of woke, dog-eating transgender immigrants”.

“You must get out and vote,” he urged. “Every vote counts, assuming the Trump administration allows the states to count the votes,” especially given that Trump’s justice department will deploy thousands of employees to “observe” poll workers as they count the votes.

“I will say, there is something funny about Republicans accusing Democrats of cheating while their leader is offering everyone $5,000 to vote Republican,” Kimmel noted. “Everyone’s worried Trump is going to do something crazy if there’s a big, beautiful, blue wave next week, but does this to you sound like a man who might refuse to accept the outcome of an election?”

Asked if he would respect the results of the election, Trump answered: “I will – if they’re honest elections.”

Kimmel offered a translation: “If his side wins, the elections were honest. If they lose, they were not. It’s really very simple. I don’t know what you people don’t understand about it.”

Seth Meyers

And on Late Night, Seth Meyers opened with disbelief that the midterm elections are only a week away. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” he said. “Only two more weeks until there’s two more years until there’s 90 days until the next insurrection.”

During a rally in Iowa last week, the Republican congressional candidate Joe Mitchell gave Trump the “man of the century award”, which Meyers pointed out is “not a real award”.

“And that’s coming from someone who hosted the Golden Globes.”

Mitchell claimed that he came up with the honor, delivered via framed certificate, himself. “Sorry, that’s the award?” Meyers laughed. “For being the best man of the whole century? That looks like he graduated from an eight-week computer class at night school.”

In other campaign news, while speaking to reporters on Saturday after voting early in Florida, Trump said that his uncle invented radar. “And you know what that means: time to ace another cognitive exam!” Meyers quipped.

And during a rally on Friday, Trump again said that he wanted to change the name of New Mexico to “New America”.

“Dude, you can’t call it ‘New America’ when it’s in America,” Meyers corrected. “Do you think that Rome has a neighborhood called ‘Little Italy’? If anything, they might have a New America.”