It’s a complicated time, and it’s getting more complicated daily in surprising ways. Such as Donald Trump’s seemingly very serious new attack on Twitter, which was the subject of a portion of Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” Wednesday night.
“It’s been an all-caps kind of week for our dear misleader. Twitter yesterday, for the first time ever, flagged his tweets as potentially misleading,” Kimmel said about midway through the monologue. “This is the first time they’ve ever done something like this. They put an exclamation point with a link below it that says, ‘Get the facts about mail-in ballots.’
“If you click on that, you get articles disproving Trump’s claim that mail-in ballots lead to widespread voter fraud. I guess this is good, but I don’t know. Do we really need Twitter to tell us our fake President tweets fake things? Is that their job?”
Kimmel then briefly described Trump’s vocal response to Twitter’s move, which of course happened on Twitter as well in a two-tweet thread on Tuesday.
Trump wrote: “@Twitter is now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election. They are saying my statement on Mail-In Ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud, is incorrect, based on fact-checking by Fake News CNN and the Amazon Washington Post…”
And his follow-up: “…Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!”
“What that means, who knows?” Kimmel said. “I guess it was only a matter of time before Donald Trump would be in a Twitter feud with Twitter.”
Of course, this drama is, for numerous reasons, not all fun and games. Beyond just Trump’s attempt to flex on Twitter, the topic that sparked this whole thing — whether all citizens should be able to vote by mail due to the pandemic — is going to be an issue for a long time.
“This new kick he’s on, this trying to stop voting by mail, is actually very scary because it’s pretty clear that he is setting the stage to claim he was cheated if he loses the election. Which could potentially result in real violence in this country,” Kimmel said.
“And to help him push our democracy to the edge of a cliff, Kellyanne Conway spoke to reporters today to say, pandemic/shmandemic. Real American voters wait in line!”
The show then pulled up a clip of Conway comparing voting to waiting in line for an hour to buy a cupcake in Georgetown.
“You hear that Jane? To get a cupcake!” Kimmel asked his young daughter, who sat on the couch behind him throughout the monologue. And then he returned to Conway’s comment.
“Boy, she won big points with President Sprinkles on that one. Voting in person and cupcakes? That’s as close as he gets to a threesome nowadays. Vote or diabetes.”