Late-night hosts discuss Trump’s legal future, Musk’s ties to the White House and Democrats’ lessons from Harris’s loss

Late-night hosts talk Elon Musk calling Jimmy Kimmel a “propaganda puppet”, how Democrats move forward and bankruptcy court for TGI Fridays.

Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel continued to process the election results on Thursday evening. “The crazy thing is, there are still two months before our long national nightmare even begins,” he said of Donald Trump’s victory. “It’s like we’re standing in the middle of the road waiting for a bus to hit us, but it’s still 40 miles away.”

Kimmel then took aim at Trump’s richest ally, Musk, who posted on X, formerly Twitter until he bought it, that Kimmel was “an insufferable nonsense propaganda puppet”.

“At least my children like me,” Kimmel retorted. “The guy who paid people $1m a day to vote for Donald Trump is calling me a propaganda puppet? Listen Kermit, you bought Twitter. You bought a social media platform that is literally a propaganda machine.

“Let me tell you something,” he continued. “If I spent four weeks trying to come up with a description of Elon Musk, I don’t think I could do better than ‘insufferable nonsense propaganda puppet’.”

Kimmel reminded viewers of what Trump used to say about Musk before the Tesla CEO gave him $100m. In June 2022, he posted on Truth Social about meeting with Musk, bragging: “I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg’ and he would have done it … ”

“And you know what he means by beg, right?” Kimmel laughed. “I’m sure you guys will be great together now that you’re friends. I’m sure his little hand will fit nicely in your sockhole.”

Seth Meyers

On Late Night, Seth Meyers lamented how the justice department is reportedly wrapping up its legal cases against Trump in wake of his second term as president. “We have a stupid system that’s basically makes getting elected president a get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said. “They’re going to have to add one to Monopoly that says ‘Run for president, win, collect $200’ and then a second card that says ‘Unless your name is Rudy Giuliani, then you’re still broke and disbarred and weird.’

“So Trump’s about to skate and Republicans are demanding peace, meanwhile Democrats have descended into recriminations and finger-pointing,” he said before several clips of Democratic pundits blaming the “far left” for Kamala Harris’s defeat.

“You think Kamala Harris was too far left? She campaigned with Liz Cheney!” Meyers countered. “The only way she could’ve run a more mainstream, centrist campaign was if she formed a Huey Lewis cover band with Mitt Romney and did a cameo on Law & Order. I mean, she praised Dick Cheney, for crying out loud!

“It’s not an issue of left versus far left,” he later added. “You just have to make people’s lives better in a way that’s direct and easy to understand and then aggressively take credit for it.

“There are lessons Democrats can take away from this election, and if they implement those lessons quickly, a lot can change,” he concluded.

Stephen Colbert

And on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert mourned a different type of loss: the potential end of TGI Fridays, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week. “But if there are no more TGI Fridays, what are we going to thank God for now?” he joked. “I don’t understand – Wednesday? We’re too busy humping! God doesn’t want to see that.”

According to Fortune, the restaurant chain is worried it won’t have enough cash if customers redeem the $50m in outstanding gift cards that don’t expire. “So the greatest threat TGI Fridays is facing is that someday, it might occur to people to dine there,” Colbert laughed. “So that $50m in gift cards may soon be worthless, but don’t worry you can always use them at TGI Fridays sister restaurant: Aah, It’s Monday.”

In more serious news, “we still don’t know the entire parade of clowns, degenerates and in-laws that Trump will have running this country,” said Colbert, but it’s likely one will be former presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr. The Kennedy scion made headlines throughout his campaign for “doing a whole bunch of crazy stuff”, including but not limited to: dumping a dead bear in Central Park as a prank, living with an emu that would regularly attack his wife, owning two ravens who would “meditate” with him, bragging about his freezer full of roadkill meat, and beheading a whale and then strapping it to the roof of his minivan for a five-hour drive home.

“Now, that sounds deranged,” said Colbert, “but he actually has a good reason for all of this: a worm got into his brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” (That’s yet another reported Kennedy story.)

“So, naturally, this whale-decapitating, bear-dumping, walking, talking worm cemetery is who Donald Trump wants to put in charge of our nation’s health,” Colbert lamented.