Jimmy Kimmel Is Smart When He Calls Trump Supporters Stupid

Remember when we had a president who could go a single day without saying something incredibly stupid? Even George W. Bush could avoid saying something stupid by just continuing to read My Pet Goat. Our current president, however, seems to be biologically incapable of keeping his big trap shut and not making everything worse every single day.

This has not escaped Jimmy Kimmel. Kimmel wasn’t planning on doing his entire monologue about Trump on last night’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, but when the President of the United States sides with Nazis, it’s hard to talk about The Bachelor in Paradise. You can see Kimmel’s full monologue below.

Kimmel opened his remarks by saying, “I even thought ‘Hey, maybe we won’t talk about Donald Trump much tonight,’ and then he opened his mouth and all manner of stupid came out. This press conference … it was supposed to be about infrastructure and it ended with our president making an angry and passionate defense of white supremacists. It was like if your bookclub meeting turned into a cockfight.” He went on to say, “I feel like I can say this with reasonable certainty, the president is completely unhinged.”

Where’s the lie?

After showing just how unhinged Trump is, Jimmy reached out to Trump’s supporters, telling them he understood why Trump was an appealing candidate, but that maybe a full-throated defense of actual, literal Nazis chanting WWII-era Nazi slogans and carrying around cosplay shields and Nazi flags is too far and it’s time to come back to the side of sanity. Guess who didn’t like that?

If you said “a bunch of idiot Trump supporters on Facebook,” then you get a gold star. When Kimmel posted a YouTube video of his monologue to Facebook, a bunch of people crawled out of the woodwork to defend President Trump (side note: does anyone else feel a bit of vomit coming up the back of their throats when they say that? Just me?). Kimmel wasn’t having it, but he also wasn’t about to waste his time trying to reason with people who have seen what this president has done and still think he should be president. So he replied “you are a stupid person”. Over and over, to everyone showing up to defend Trump.

Jimmy Kimmel sort of hit on the perfect response. While it’s not literally true that you have to be stupid to be a racist, it’s not really worth lecturing someone on why chanting “The Jews will not replace us” is bad. If they’re not stupid, they’ve made an informed and reasoned decision that racism is better than introspection. While it’s possible for an intelligent person to be evil and racist, it does no more good to argue with such a person than it does to argue with a stupid person. Aside from being very funny, Kimmel was actually brilliant here in not letting these people go unchallenged while also not wasting time engaging with them.

Trump’s behavior was so unacceptable that even Kimmel’s competitor Jimmy Fallon, who has given politics a wide berth during his time as host of The Tonight Show, addressed the president’s response to Charlottesville, where Heather Heyer, an IWW member and Bernie Sanders supporter who had come to counter-protest the white supremacist March taking place, was murdered in a terrorist attack by one of the aforementioned white supremacists. Fallon has taken a lot of flak for his decision to not challenge Trump on his campaign during a September episode of The Tonight Show, instead opting to ruffle his hair. I feel for Fallon, he’s the host of The Tonight Show, not Meet the Press, and he’s not Steven Colbert. Jimmy Kimmel shows, however, that even a mostly non-political comic is better off being true to what he believes than in trying to please everyone all the time.