Jimmy Kimmel was bewildered by the revelation that senior Trump officials had conspired to cover up Trump’s alleged nipple fetish.
The president’s inner circle gathered for a secret meeting last August to discuss the damaging claims about the president in the Epstein files, the New York Times Magazine reported on Wednesday.
One of those claims reportedly described an encounter where Trump had “aggressively flick[ed] and suck[ed] a young woman’s nipples until they ‘looked incredibly painful.’”
Kimmel explained Trump’s “aggressive nipple fetish” to viewers in his Wednesday monologue and marveled at how Vice President JD Vance allegedly handled the debate over whether to release the emails describing it.
“Vance said he thought the president would be OK with releasing the nipple-related documents, arguing that he had been accused of worse,” Kimmel said, quoting from the article.
Kimmel continued, “JD Vance argued that all the files should be released as soon as possible, which, of course, as soon as they are, he’s going to be marching along to ‘Hail to the Chief.’”
The joke referred to the 19th-century song that was adapted into the presidential anthem.
Kimmel couldn’t help but wonder how differently the secret conversation in the Situation Room would’ve gone down if Trump’s previous vice president, evangelical Mike Pence, had been there in Vance’s place.
“Can you imagine if this happened in Trump’s first term?” Kimmel said. “Imagine Mike Pence having to deal with nipple-related emails. He’d be in a cold shower for two weeks.”
Referencing the long-running unsubstantiated rumor that Pence refers to his wife as “Mother,” Kimmel joked about Pence, “Mother would have to do an exorcism on him.”
Vance had reportedly argued in the meeting that releasing the information about Trump to the public would ”cause people to say we’re going further than we need to.” However, Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, shut Vance’s idea down.
CNN journalist Brian Stelter reported Wednesday that, in the aftermath of the NYT article, there is a “massive leak hunt underway” within the White House.
The article was an excerpt from the upcoming book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, by White House reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. The book releases June 23.
