Jimmy Kimmel ridiculed Karoline Leavitt for her unhinged defense of President Donald Trump’s suggestion that the upcoming midterm elections should be canceled.
The White House press secretary on Thursday claimed the 79-year-old president was speaking “facetiously” when he said in a Reuters interview that he’d already achieved so much in his second term in the White House that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
“This kind of talk is disturbing, even for him. So he left it to his lady chipmunk Karoline Leavitt to try to reel that one back in,” Kimmel joked in his monologue Thursday.
Leavitt, 28, said she attended Wednesday’s “closed-door” interview and clarified that there was no audio or video.
“The president was simply joking,” she said. “He was saying, ‘We are doing such a great job, we are doing everything the American people thought. Maybe we should just keep rolling.’ But he was speaking facetiously.”
“Facetiously” is a word Trump “can neither spell nor define,” Kimmel, 57, said.
“He was joking. He was joking. He was joking… If there is one thing we’ve learned about this guy is that he doesn’t joke,” Kimmel added. “He insults people. But bringing laughter to others is not typically at the top of his list.”
Ahead of the November elections, many prominent figures—and even Trump himself—have said they aren’t confident the GOP will perform well.
Earlier this month, Trump begged Republicans to win the 2026 congressional midterm elections to stop Democrats from attempting to impeach him.
“You gotta win the midterms ’cause, if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just gonna be—I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me. I’ll get impeached,” the president said at a retreat in Washington.
“They say that when you win the presidency, you lose the midterm,” Trump added. “I wish you could explain to me what the hell’s going on with the mind of the public.”
Historically, the president’s party tends to lose ground in midterm elections. Since 1934, George W. Bush is the only president whose party gained seats in both chambers of Congress, in 2002.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
