Add Jimmy Kimmel to the list of late night hosts who can’t stop talking about the group chat shared around the world. The ABC host didn’t hold back on Wednesday night, mocking the Trump administration and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, in particular, for adding the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to a Signal group chat that shared sensitive information.
“Who could ever have guessed that the host of weekend ‘Fox and Friends’ would be bad at running the military?” Kimmel asked.
The late night host told his studio audience that Hegseth gave the Signal group a two-hour heads up on “every detail relating to the timing and scope of the attack, the weapons they were using — details that could have easily compromised the mission and endangered the pilots flying it if those texts had been hacked or shared with the wrong people.”
“This operation was as secretive as a ‘Fortnite’ Twitch stream,” Kimmel joked.
Kimmel was sympathetic to the career military leaders who are now working under Hegseth, saying that, if this was happening in the ’90s, it would be like suddenly having to take orders from Kathie Lee. Later in the monologue, he said that, moving forward, the administration would be sharing “top-secret information” on TikTok “where it’s safe.”
He also criticized the Trump administration over refusing to call the messages “war plans.” Instead, they have repeatedly clarified that they were actually “attack plans.” Kimmel read out several details from the leaked messages to let his audience decide what the appropriate nomenclature would be.
“I’m not an expert on war. These don’t look like peace plans to me,” Kimmel said.
The “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” host also took a swing at Trump’s war against DEI initiatives. “Thank God they got rid of DEI. Now you can rest assured that the idiots in charge are not chosen for their race or gender. They were chosen purely based on being idiots,” he said. Watch the full opening monologue above.
