In the darkest days of 1939, German writer Bertolt Brecht wondered if people would still make music during the bleakness to come. "In the dark times, will there also be singing?" Brecht asked in one of his poems. "Yes, there will also be singing," the poet answered himself. "About the dark times."
Well, in the darkest days of the American Republic it appears there is still singing about the dark times—except the clarion voices are late-night comedians, and the songs are incisive opening monologues that eventually go semi-viral on YouTube.
On Tuesday night, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel opened his show Jimmy Kimmel Live! with a searing, unusually long speech (mostly transcribed here) addressing the president's breathtaking remarks on Charlottesville. "It was supposed to be a press conference about infrastructure and it ended with our president making an angry and passionate defense of white supremacists. It was like if your book club turned into a cockfight," Kimmel said, comparing the speech to the presidential equivalent of when Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield's ear off, and then he bit his other ear off.
He then directly addressed Trump voters, saying he understood where they had been coming from, and saying they can now do one of two things—"You can dig in like Chris Christie at a hometown buffet. Or, you can treat the situation like you would if you’d put Star Wars wallpaper up in the kitchen: 'All right, I got caught up. I was excited. I made a mistake. And now it needs to go.'"
"Well, now he does need to go. So it’s time for especially you who voted for him to tell him to go," Kimmel continued, before suggesting that perhaps the United States should instead install Trump as a kind of ceremonial "first king of America."
"Think about it," Kimmel said. "England has a queen. She lives in a palace. Everyone makes a big deal when she shows up. She has no power at all. In the morning they put a crown on her head, she stands there and waves, she goes back to bed."
"That’s what we need to do with Donald Trump," Kimmel went on. "We need to set him up in a castle, maybe in Florida. Lead him to the top. And then lock the door to that castle forever."
Watch the full video here:
