Jimmy Kimmel opened Wednesday night’s (June 19) episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! by honoring Juneteenth before focusing on recent comments from author and Variety editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh about Donald Trump‘s cognitive decline.
Setoodeh is set to release a new book in August, which is all about Trump’s reality television background, specifically his time as host of The Apprentice on NBC. In researching the book, Setoodeh conducted six interviews with the former president since May 2021.
On Tuesday (June 18), Setoodeh appeared on CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins and was asked about what Trump was like during these interviews. The journalist described Trump as “meandering and confusing,” adding, “there were some cognitive questions about where he was and what he was thinking, and he would—from time to time—become confused.”
Kimmel focused on this, starting with Setoodeh’s claims that Trump couldn’t remember who he was, despite having already met Setoodeh for a previous interview. The author then had to start from scratch, with Trump apparently telling him the same stories again.
“I don’t know about that. It’s not like him to repeat himself,” Kimmel said before pointing out how Trump’s team denied Setoodeh’s claims and referred to him as a “nobody and a loser.”
“Which I guess is why he took time to do interviews with him. One with the nobody, one with the loser,” Kimmel joked. “Person, woman, man, camera. It’s all there.”
He then turned his attention to a bizarre statement Trump allegedly made to Setoodeh. “He also made a claim that indicates the lying and dementia might be starting to team up,” the late-night host said as he threw to a clip of Setoodeh explaining how Trump claimed the late comedian Joan Rivers voted for him in the 2016 presidential election.
Rivers, who won Season 8 of The Apprentice, died in 2014, which would, of course, have made it literally impossible for her to have voted for Trump in 2016.
“He’s right; dead people are voting!” Kimmel quipped. “Maybe she voted with a ouija board? I don’t know.”
Kimmel also pointed out how Trump apparently seemed to think he was still president, airing a clip of Setoodeh telling Collins how, on one occasion, Trump left the interview because he said he “needed to go upstairs and deal with Afghanistan.”
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Trump also reportedly referred to the country as “the Afghanistan,” with emphasis on the “the.”
“That’s gotta be his code word for the toilet, right?” Kimmel joked. “I’ve gotta go make the Afghanistan.”
“It’s very scary to think that the guy who was telling us to inject bleach into our veins is just now deteriorating mentally,” the comedian continued. “That would mean that when he was drawing in sharpie on the weather maps, he was fine.”
You can watch Kimmel’s full opening monologue above.
Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Weeknights, 11:35/10:35c, ABC
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