Jimmy Kimmel Brings the Receipts to Shred Trump’s Charlie Kirk ‘Rhetoric’ Blame Game
Jimmy Kimmel delivered a blistering rebuke of President Donald Trump’s response to the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, accusing the president of inflaming rather than easing the nation’s divisions by blaming Democrats and comparing it to statements made by former presidents on Wednesday.
Kirk was fatally shot while speaking at Utah Valley University on Wednesday, a killing Kimmel described at the opening of his show as “a senseless murder.”
In an address from the Oval Office hours after the attack, Trump raged at the “radical left” for pushing “ rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”
At the beginning of Thursday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! the host began by condemning the “vile” glee shown by online trolls following the Turning Point USA founder’s assassination, which he said he’d seen on “both sides of the political spectrum.”
“Some are even cheering it, which is something I won’t ever understand,” he added.
But Kimmel reserved his sharpest words for Trump:
And with all of these terrible things happening, you would think that our president would at least make an attempt to bring us together, but he didn’t. President Obama did, President Biden did, Presidents Bush and Clinton did. President Trump did not. Instead, he blamed Democrats for their rhetoric.
Unloading on the president, Kimmel continued, running down a list of past comments made by Trump in recent years, the host arguing that despite his past rhetoric, the president pointed the finger across the political aisle:
The man who told a crowd of supporters that maybe ‘the Second Amendment people’ should do something about Hillary Clinton, the man who said he wouldn’t mind if someone shot through the fake news media, the man who unleashed a mob on the Capitol and said Liz Cheney should ‘face nine barrels shooting at her’ for supporting his opponent, blames the radical left for their rhetoric.
Kirk’s death came one day before the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the day that Kimmel’s show was airing, and that too became a focal point for the host’s extended takedown of Trump’s past words:
And then, the man who on 9/11 bragged that his building was now the tallest building in New York — which wasn’t even true, by the way — visited the Pentagon today for a 9/11 memorial. Which, believe it or not, he made a ‘bigly’ improvement over last year when he showed up at a 9/11 remembrance at a fire station in Lower Manhattan with a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who claims it was an inside job.
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The monologue comes after Kimmel took to Instagram after the shooting to urge Americans to reject “angry finger-pointing” and confront the “horrible and monstrous” reality of gun violence.
