Late-night comedy shows were unable to derail President-elect Donald Trump’s second presidential victory last month despite aiming nearly all their political firepower on him.
Despite focusing their sharpest political jokes on President-elect Donald Trump for years, especially in the lead up to Election Day 2024, prominent network comedy shows did not derail Trump’s victory.
Late-night hosts Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and others, along with the usual anti-Trump suspects at NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” were unsuccessful in using their platforms to sway voters away from boosting Trump to a decisive victory in November. Some even raised millions of dollars for Trump’s Democratic opponents, and it didn’t amount to much.
The impotency of their anti-Trump media barrage was so frustrating for these comedians after Election Day that some resorted to curses and even shedding tears on-air.
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As they had done for the entirety of Trump’s almost decade-long political career, the mainstream late-night comics went all-in on pro-Democratic and anti-Trump humor.
According to a recent study from the media watchdog group Media Research Center, nearly all the political jokes told on each of the five major TV late-night shows at the height of the presidential campaign were anti-Trump.
These shows included Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” CBS’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” and NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”
The study, published late October, found that out of the 1,463 jokes about both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on these five shows from September 3 through October 25, 1,428 of the jokes were targeted at Donald Trump.
As MRC analyst Alex Christy noted in his report, “That’s a whopping 40:1 ratio or almost 98 percent to 2 percent.”
Even some of the rare anti-Democratic jokes appeared to be softened by hosts. Back when President Biden was still the party’s nominee, NBC’s Meyers tempered a joke about Biden’s age with a disclaimer about Trump’s criminality.
“As we made clear on this show repeatedly, there’s no equivalency between a competent 81-year-old who occasionally shows signs of age and a demented 77-year-old criminal who says dead people rigged the election and thinks electric boat batteries will lead to shark attacks,” he said in June.
When asked why this anti-Trump offensive didn’t sway the election for Harris, executive editor of MRC Newsbusters, Tim Graham, told Fox News Digital that these hosts were just preaching to the anti-Trump choir and not changing minds.
“The so-called comedians on the late-night shows were never going to harm Trump because their audiences are fully stocked with Trump-hating Democrats who want their fix of Trump hatred,” Graham said, adding, “Colbert and Kimmel and the rest sound more like Democrat Senators more than people hired to make you laugh.”
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The executive editor provided an example of Kimmel bringing out his wife, Molly McNearney, during the Sept. 25 episode of his show to advise Trump to “shut up and go away.”
“Go to Mar-a-Lago, spend all day, every day, cheating at golf and masturbating to Newsmax, and let a competent woman take over. That’s my advice. That’s my advice. Thanks for listening,” she said.
Throughout the campaign, longtime sketch show “Saturday Night Live” continued their routine digs at the GOP candidate. In one sketch that took heat from the Trump campaign, the show made light of the assassination attempts against Trump, featuring its Trump impressionist insisting that people love his rallies except when people shoot at them.
The line was played for laughs, however the Trump campaign account called it “disgusting.”
The sketch series also got into hot water for having Harris participate in a sketch less than a week ahead of the election. People slammed the vice president and the NBC series for organizing the appearance and not having Trump on as well.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr accused the last-minute Harris invite of being a “clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule,” adding, “The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct – a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election. Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns.”
The Trump campaign told Fox News Digital in November that no one from “SNL” reached out to them for a Trump appearance ahead of the election.
In addition to the onslaught of jokes against Trump and his base, multiple late-night hosts actively campaigned and raised funds for the Democratic presidential campaign.
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Kimmel threw a Biden campaign fundraiser in Los Angeles last June that raised over $30 million for President Biden. Actors George Clooney, Julia Roberts and former President Obama were among the attendees.
That happened less than three months after CBS’ Stephen Colbert participated in a lavish record-setting fundraiser that brought in $26 million for the Biden campaign.
Kimmel also helped compose a DNC fundraising email in September that provided links for recipients to send money to the Harris-Walz campaign. In it, he composed a message, which read, “Sorry to break your cold little heart, Donald, but I endorse Kamala Harris for president. I’ve had the privilege of interviewing our Vice President several times. She is a kind, brilliant and delightful person who cares very much about our country.”
Despite all these efforts on behalf of mainstream comedians to stop Trump, the candidate won a decisive victory over Harris on Nov. 5, prompting her late-night supporters to melt down in response.
“Well, f—. It happened again.” Colbert said during his show following Trump’s victory. “After a bizarre and vicious campaign fueled by a desperate need not to go to jail, Donald Trump has won the 2024 election.”
Fallon appeared crestfallen at the election results, slamming Trump with a sarcastic dig during his show.
“Yep, Trump returning to the White House is a huge, historic comeback for someone who literally never went away,” he said.
Kimmel told his audience the Wednesday after Election Day, “It was a terrible night last night.” While going through a long list of how many different things Trump’s victory is “terrible” for, the ABC host became emotional and started crying.
Meyers told his viewers the day after Trump’s win that something in his “brain broke a little bit last night,” and “The Daily Show” correspondent Ronny Chieng told Comedy Central viewers that if any of them are dual citizens, they need to travel to the other country because of America’s “turn towards fascism.”
