Jimmy Kimmel, who has frequently traded barbs with Trump on social media, opened his show with a sketch where he is seen frantically packing in his office.
“I’m leaving the country,” he announces. “I can’t stay for another four years of this. Who knows what he’s going to do? … He said he has a list of enemies. You think I’m not on that list?”
After his sidekick, Guillermo Rodriguez, convinced him to stay in the segment (before declaring he’s leaving to go “back to Mexico”), Kimmel began his monologue by joking about the fact that Trump won the election after falsely claiming he lost in 2020 due to widespread voter fraud.
“I guess this election wasn’t rigged,” he said. “That’s weird though, right? I mean, he said it would be rigged. He said it was being rigged while people were in line voting! Isn’t it remarkable that this time, the fix wasn’t in? Last time, the Democrats cheated. This time, we chose not to, I guess.”
Kimmel told viewers his “kids were very upset” by Trump’s win, and he got choked up while describing Tuesday as a “terrible night.”
“It was a terrible night for women, for children, for the hundreds of thousands of hardworking immigrants who make this country go, for health care, for our climate, for science, for journalism, for justice, for free speech,” he said. “It was a terrible night for poor people, for the middle class, for seniors who rely on Social Security, for our allies in Ukraine, for NATO, for the truth and democracy and decency.”
“It was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him, and guess what? It was a bad night for everyone who voted for him, too. You just don’t realize it yet.”
But Kimmel took comfort in the fact that “we’ve been through this once before” during Trump’s first term. “And yes, this time it is probably going to be worse, maybe a lot worse. But I also think that maybe we will look back and realize that, in the long run, this is what we needed to wake us up. Maybe the people who care so much about him need to find out how little he cares about them.”
