Jimmy Kimmel
Late-night hosts mocked the end of former vice-president Mike Pence’s presidential hopes, as he terminated his four-month-long campaign over the weekend. Speaking to a conference of Jewish Republicans at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas, Pence said: “It’s become clear to me that this is not my time.”
“His time was 1956, and he missed it,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Monday evening. “Mike Pence ending his campaign in Las Vegas could be a sign he’s losing his mind. Next time we see him, he’ll blackout drunk on TMZ yelling ‘the only God I believe in is Criss Angel!’
“It’s a shame that he’ll never be president,” Kimmel deadpanned. “For one, imagine all the wonderful dancing that would’ve been outlawed at his inaugural ball.
“And while the GOP primary may have lost a principled man who commanded almost 4% of the vote,” he added, “the Space Force just gained one hell of an intergalactic moon ranger. For that, I applaud him.”
Meanwhile, Pence’s “former owner” Donald Trump had plenty to say about him this weekend. The former president posted to Truth Social many angry messages about a number of potential witnesses for his trials late into the night and early in the morning. “At this point, he doesn’t need a gag order so much as he needs a shock collar to contain himself,” said Kimmel.
Stephen Colbert
“Now, I don’t know about you, but I was very surprised … that Mike Pence was running for president,” said Stephen Colbert on the Late Show.
Colbert also mocked Pence’s sign-off that 2024 “is not my time”.
“He’s right. Mike Pence’s time is 1692,” Colbert quipped. “His place? Salem. His job? Man who shoves woman into river to see if she’s a witch.”
Pence’s campaign hadn’t been going well for awhile; Politico recently reported that at one campaign stop in the midwest, he couldn’t get a crowd of 15 to a Pizza Ranch. “Which of course raises one obvious question,” said Colbert. “What the hell is a pizza ranch?”
Pence was also polling at about 2% in Iowa. “You hear that, Chris Christie? You bag those Pence voters, you could be polling as high as … 2%,” Colbert joked.
“Now that Pence is hanging it up, one candidate trying to get his endorsement is the guy who tried to get him hanged,” he continued before a clip of Trump openly seeking Pence’s endorsement for president at an Iowa campaign stop. “You’re asking for the endorsement of someone you almost got killed?” Colbert marveled. “That’s like if Jigsaw’s victims left a Yelp review – ‘very challenging escape room, two thumbs up if I still had thumbs.’”
And in other news, the new speaker of the House, the Louisiana representative, Mike Johnson, offered Americans a window into his mindset when he described the Bible as “that’s my worldview. That’s what I believe.”
“That’s great. If the Bible is his worldview on any issue, I don’t know why progressives are nervous. He’s clearly going to ask the rich to sell all their possessions and give their money to the poor!” Colbert deadpanned.
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers tore into more Trump gaffes from the campaign trail. “Trump’s brain has obviously been mush for quite some time, but still somehow it seems noticeably worse, and I didn’t think that was possible,” he said as, over the weekend, Trump appeared to not know what state he was in, mistaking Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with Sioux City, Iowa.
“It’s telling how different the reactions are when Biden screws up versus when Trump screws up,” Meyers added. “When Biden so much as stumbles, Democrats everywhere are like, ‘oh fuck, fuck, who else can we get?! There’s nobody!’ And when Trump screws up, Republicans are like ‘all right, we live in Sioux Falls now, who cares.’”
“I’m not going to sit here and deny that Biden also stumbles or gets lost sometimes,” he continued. “He’s 80, we get it. The point is, they’re both old, we all just age in different ways. When I get to that age, I’d definitely rather be Biden old than Trump old, just telling old stories and crushing people’s hands with my blue-collar handshake.
“I want to be walking around my kitchen muttering to my grandkids about how I used to know a guy named Corn Pop,” he concluded. “That seems much more pleasant than screaming non-stop about windmills killing whales and celebrities who were or weren’t nice to me back in the day.”
