Right-wing billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy met with Republicans in Congress on Thursday to discuss their “Department of Government Efficiency” group. And in his monologue later that night, Jimmy Kimmel joked that among other things, the meeting featured “a lot of missed high fives.”
You know, because dorks.
“Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, the Lenny and Squiggy of Trump Town,” Kimmel said, “met with Republicans in Washington today to discuss their new ‘Department of Government Efficiency.’ We don’t know all of what went on in the meeting. We can assume that there were a lot of missed high fives.”
“But other than that, all we know is that one of the Congress people they met with was Marjorie Taylor Green, who afterwards… told reporters Musk said he’d be putting lawmakers on a ‘naughty list’ and a ‘nice list,’” Kimmel explained. “Nothing to worry about. They’re just a foreign-born billionaire deciding which of our elected officials get to wake up on Christmas morning and which don’t.”
Then Kimmel explained the dumbest thing about the Department of Government Efficiency. “By the way, this group they run, DOGE, has no power to make laws, to cut budget, or to do anything at all. It’s like when you’re a kid and you visit the cockpit. The pilot will, he gives you, you get a set of wings. It doesn’t mean you get to fly the plane.”
Kimmel is correct of course. DOGE is a purely advisory panel whose name was intentionally created to form the word “doge,” a reference to the cryptocurrency scam Musk has long supported. Nevertheless, Musk and Ramaswamy have a lot of influence with the right-wing core of the Republican Party. You can watch Kimmel’s full monologue below: