Jimmy Kimmel still can’t get over just how much President Trump lied in his big speech to Congress on Tuesday.
After joking that Trump lied “11 million” times during his 99-minute address, Kimmel zeroed in on the claim that baffled him the most: Trump’s notion that the Biden administration had been spending “$8 million on making mice transgender.”
“This is real,” Trump said after making the claim.
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“No, it’s not real,” Kimmel replied Wednesday night.
The late-night host continued, “You know, you hear the president of the United States say we’re spending $8 million to do sex change operations on mice. You say, ‘Well, I’m sure he’s exaggerating, but there must be something there.‘ Turns out there’s not. It’s not real.”
“The government spent money on transgenic mice, which are genetically modified mice they use in lab tests to study disease,“ Kimmel explained. ”It has nothing to do with being transgender. Other than the word, the ‘trans’ part of the word.”
“You think they know this and just ignore it, or are they so dumb they don’t know how to Google?” Kimmel wondered. “Or maybe they think we’re so dumb we don’t know how to Google? I don’t know.”
“They’re turning Mickeys into Minnies and Minnies into Mickeys!” Kimmel joked. “No, they’re just trying to cure dementia and heart disease.”
“Which you would think Trump would be for,” Kimmel added, “Seeing as how they are both coming for him real soon.”
Kimmel is hardly the first to fact-check Trump’s characterization of government spending on “making mice transgender.” CNN’s Deidre McPhillips also looked into the claim after Trump’s speech.
CNN reported that government money had gone towards testing “differences in the ways an HIV vaccine worked in mice that had received cross-sex hormone therapy.”
In other words, according to the report, “The studies were meant to figure out how these treatments might affect the health of humans who take them, not for the purpose of making mice transgender.”
