Ted Cruz must be breathing a sigh of relief. After dragging the Republican Senator on multiple occasions last week, Kimmel lit into Donald Trump and a slew of his cronies during his opening monologue on Tuesday evening’s edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live!
But before he roasted the former president, Kimmel lit into 90s rapper Vanilla Ice—who performed at Trump’s 2021 Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party—for trying to honor fallen troops on Memorial Day by sharing a photo of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle draped with an American flag. “Thank you for your service, Dudes,” said Kimmel. Kimmel then moved onto “soon-to-be-imprisoned congressman” Matt Gaetz, who was duped into retweeting a photo of Lee Harvey Oswald in uniform on Memorial Day by The Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein. Once Gaetz retweeted the photo of JFK’s assassin, Klippenstein changed his Twitter handle to “matt gaetz is a pedo,” referring to the fact that Gaetz is currently under federal investigation over allegations of sex trafficking a minor, which Gaetz vehemently denies. “He got Mattfished,” Kimmel quipped.
But wait, there’s more! Kimmel also took on Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser and “pardon pal” Michael Flynn, who recently appeared at a MAGA conference in Dallas—or, as Kimmel called it, “Q-anon Con.” At the conference, Flynn was asked why the violent and deadly military coup in Myanmar (which the question poser pronounced “Mini-mar”) couldn’t happen in the U.S. “No reason,” responds Flynn, in footage from the event. “It should happen here.”
Flynn later tried to walk back his statements, writing on Telegram, “There is NO reason whatsoever for any coup in America, and I do not and have not at any time called for any action of that sort.” Kimmel, however, wasn’t buying it. “Except for this weekend, when you did it on video,” noted Kimmel, “and the times when you did it leading up to January 6.” Kimmel continued to lay into Flynn, a.k.a “General Lies-enhower”: “Maybe there should be a coup down at ‘Myan-Mar-a-Lago,’” Kimmel added.
And finally, Kimmel noted that New York Times Washington Correspondent Maggie Haberman has reported that Trump believes he’ll be reinstated as President in August “after Arizona finishes that cyber ninja ‘audit’ of the election they’re doing.” That bit of news, he said, is “so completely insane and dumb, it has to be true. We’ll know for sure once we hear [Trump] deny it.”
— A First Look at Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon
— 15 Summer Movies Worth Returning to Theaters For
— Why Evan Peters Needed a Hug After His Big Mare of Easttown Scene
— Shadow and Bone Creators Break Down Those Big Book Changes
— The Particular Bravery of Elliot Page’s Oprah Interview
— Inside the Collapse of the Golden Globes
— Watch Justin Theroux Break Down His Career
— For the Love of Real Housewives: An Obsession That Never Quits
— From the Archive: The Sky’s the Limit for Leonardo DiCaprio
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.