Jimmy Kimmel isn’t buying Donald Trump’s absurd claim that his Florida home, the private resort Mar-a-Lago, is so secure “you could say it’s an armed fortress.” And his rebuttal is simply pointing to Trump’s known behavior. “It’s a wedding venue with ketchup on the walls, is what it is,” Kimmel joked.
Trump has been making the claims about the resort for the last few days, ever since it came out last week that President Joe Biden’s team discovered 10 classified documents in a locked closet while cleaning out his private office. According to Biden, the documents were turned over to the National Archives the morning after they were found. It remains unclear what the documents were about. Later in the week, it was reported that a second set of documents were found at his home, in a locked garage, which were also immediately turned over.
Trump has attempted to draw moral equivalence to his own actions with mishandling high security documents, but there are some hugely significant differences. It was discovered last year that the twice-impeached former president had taken hundreds of classified documents with him after leaving the White House in 2021, and stored them at Mar-A-Lago in an unlocked room that several people could access. Those documents are only in the government’s possession now because after months of Trump refusing to hand them over and even lying about it, the FBI raided his house.
“This document thing. Trump is at peak ‘are you kidding me?’ right now,” Kimmel said when he brought it up during his monologue.
“He has been swimming at the bottom of the MAGA reptile tank, appearing on shows like ‘Revolver News,’ ‘America’s Top Ten Countdown with Wayne Allyn Root,’ ‘The Dr Gina Show’ and last night he was on something called ‘The Watercooler’ on Real America’s Voice,” Kimmel continued.
The host then played a clip of the interview, in which Trump, defending his decision to steal those documents and refuse to hand them back, claimed that Mar-a-Lago is “literally a fortress here. You could say it’s an armed fortress.”
“You could say that. It’s not an armed fortress. But you could say it,” Kimmel responded. “You could say anything. You could say it’s a bouncy house. Mar-a-Lago is not an armed fortress. It’s a social club that anybody who pays a $200,000 membership fee can be part of,” he added.
“It’s a wedding venue with ketchup on the walls, is what it is. Just because it has a moat full of ranch dressing doesn’t make it a fortress.”
For those wondering, the ketchup joke refers to the report that Trump was so angry with his Attorney General, Bill Barr, for determining there was no fraud in the 2020 election that he threw his dinner plates against a wall in the White House, breaking them and smearing ketchup on them.
You can watch the whole monologue in the video above.
