Jimmy Kimmel Used His Awards For a Good Cause: To Bribe Donald Trump to Get ICE Out of Minnesota
With Donald Trump receiving María Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize after that bizarre White House visit earlier this week, Jimmy Kimmel has found a creative way to put his trophy collection to use: bribing a sitting president.
At this point, the POTUS can’t hide the fact that the easiest way to open the icy cold ventricles of his pitiless heart is to wave a trophy within arm’s reach. Just ask FIFA, which created a “Peace Prize” to curry favor with him after the Norwegian Nobel Committee denied him one.
After capturing Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and establishing a puppet state to serve the interests of the United States, the country’s opposition leader María Machado made good on her promise and gifted her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump.
Now, I know these absurd developments – sounding more like skits SNL may come up with than actual things happening in real life – have turned into something of a norm in this administration. But no matter how cartoonish it gets, we need to acknowledge this reality as a farce, or otherwise we’d collectively lose our minds.
Enter Jimmy Kimmel. In a recent monologue on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the late-night host brought out an entire buffet worth of awards and trophies, offering them to Trump in exchange for the president promising to pull ICE out of Minneapolis and Minnesota and sending them back to do their actual job at the border, where they belong.
You can watch the bit for yourself at around the 9:45 mark.
“Trump loves awards,” Kimmel said. “Giving him an award is the only way to get him to do anything. And with that said, Mr. President, I have an offer I think you’re going to find difficult to refuse.”
Guillermo then brought out the spoils of Kimmel’s showbiz career on a plush red pedestal. The ensemble included an Emmy, a Clio trophy, and a Webby. “I will personally deliver any or even all of these to the Oval Office in exchange for leaving the people of Minneapolis alone,” he joked.
Trump has successfully compelled America to make the transition from late-stage capitalism to late-stage mercantilism, presiding over an oligarchic marketplace where kowtowing and sycophancy are the only reliable currency to get people of power and influence to do your bidding. And at some point, this stops being satire and starts being the kind of thing historians will struggle to explain to future generations.
Why Minneapolis and what has been the administration’s response?
After a tense week in the Twin Cities, Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell protests against ICE operations in Minnesota. Minneapolis has become the epicenter of Trump’s immigration crackdown, with ICE agents drawing widespread criticism for their use of violence against both people suspected of immigration violations and protestors.
The president has dubbed these “professional agitators and insurrectionists” while admiring the patriotism of ICE, who are simply doing their job. The fact that their job involves raiding communities and detaining people in what could only be called quasi-fascist Gestapo techniques doesn’t factor into this particular definition of patriotism.
And of course, the administration that is known for clapping back at every perceived insult and treating cable news as oxygen couldn’t let Kimmel’s stunt go unanswered. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung took to X (formerly Twitter) to call Jimmy a “no-talent loser”” and suggest he hold onto those awards “so he has something to pawn after his a– gets fired.”
No, I only wish I was making this up.
This was always going to be the inevitable endpoint of an attention economy where engagement metrics matter more than governance, or, you know, basic human decency.
That Trump would populate the White House with yes-men who cosplay as public servants and employ his tactics during this second administration shouldn’t come as a surprise. The real plot twist is that we’re sliding into autocracy one news cycle at a time, and no one can agree on whether we should be alarmed, do something about it, or just refresh X to see what happens next.
(featured image: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
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