Jimmy Kimmel still struggles to understand the Trump administration’s excuses for “Signalgate,” in which National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally added a journalist to a war plan group chat.
"President Trump hasn’t fired anyone, he hasn’t disciplined anyone. In fact, he’s calling it a witch hunt," Kimmel explained in his Thursday monologue.
“First, he blamed it on the reporter, and when that didn’t work, he blamed it on the app itself,” Kimmel said.
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He showed a clip of Trump arguing that, “Signal could be a defective platform, and we’re gonna have to find that out.”
“Right, maybe one of the wires came loose and the gasket got cracked,” Kimmel joked.
He added, “Blaming Signal for this is like blaming Tinder for when you get caught cheating on your wife.”
Kimmel also ripped into the pundits at Fox News and Newsmax for their continued attempts to downplay the scandal.
“It is a perfect storm of incompetence, inexperience, dishonesty, and hypocrisy from the same people who spent the last 12 years screaming about Hillary’s e-mails and Hunter’s laptop,“ Kimmel said.
He continued, “What do you do in a situation like this? I’ll tell you what you do. You rely on your friends in the real news media to call it no big deal and shoo it away.”
He played a montage of right-wing pundits making excuses for the scandal, ending with a series of them insisting that Signalgate is a “non-story.”
Kimmel asked GOP pundits, “If this is a non-story, why are you all still covering this story?”
The late night host added, “We got a new chapter to this story this morning,” and detailed how Mike Waltz left his Venmo friends list available to the public.
“A German newspaper, Der Spiegel, was able to find personal email addresses, phone numbers, and passwords, some of which seem to be still in use for Mike Waltz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth,” Kimmel noted.
He joked, “He shares his name, there’s a picture of him, and all of his contacts up on Venmo. Even Matt Gaetz was like, ‘How could you be so careless?‘”
