The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot kicked off its hearings on Thursday, to big ratings. Among the bombshells was this: Ivanka Trump, the former president’s eldest daughter, agreed with his former Attorney General Bill Barr that he lost in the 2020 election. She said it as sheepishly as possible, so as not to over-enrage her father. It didn’t exactly work. The next day, Trump himself claimed on Truth Social that she didn’t know what she was talking about as she had ”checked out” by then.
The following night, Jimmy Kimmel weighed in on the hearings and the responses from the GOP, including Trump. “I love his argument that Ivanka, his senior White House advisor, had checked out,” joked Kimmel. “In the Trump family, that’s called being thrown under the Access Hollywood bus.”
Kimmel also zeroed in on Fox News, which refused to air the night’s hearing, at least on their main channel. Instead, it was business as usual, with one alteration: Tucker Carlson’s show was aired without commercials, as though viewers couldn’t have a break to check out what everyone else was airing.
“Fox News is so intent on burying their viewers’ heads in the sand [that] not only didn’t they show the hearing last night, they went commercial-free for two-and-a-half hours so their viewers wouldn’t switch the channel to see what is actually going on,” Kimmel said. “They went into overdrive trying to make it seem like what happened was just a rowdy group of party people sneaking into the movies or something.”
Kimmel didn’t mind showing the footage. “It looks like a coup,” he said about scenes of Trump supporters violently storming the Capitol building and assaulting police officers. “Five people were killed on that day by those nutty goofball protesters.”
To him, the “worst part” was that the former president surely loves being back in the news, saying, “you know Trump is at home so thrilled to be back in primetime he can’t stop pullin’ his nipples. He’s crazy. He loves it.”
You can watch Kimmel’s opening monologue in the video above.