Jimmy Kimmel on Trump: ‘We are now at the women-should-smile-more stage of his presidency’ | Late-night TV roundup

Late-night hosts dug into Donald Trump’s deflections from the Jeffrey Epstein files and the backlash to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half-time show.

Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel kept the focus on the Epstein files on Tuesday, because it’s “a story that Donald Trump wishes would go away. But it won’t just go away. It’s the kind of story that makes headlines, and he knows that. So what he does is he bombards us with a dozen other crazy things to try to flood the zone.

“There’s only so much we can take in,” he continued, “so to distract us, right now what he’s doing is he’s suing everybody.” That includes the Internal Revenue Service – “the IRS that he runs” – for $10bn. “He’s planning to negotiate a settlement with himself,” said Kimmel. “If any other president did this, it would be the biggest story of their whole four years in office. For Trump, it doesn’t even crack the top five this month.”

Later in his monologue, Kimmel turned his attention to a contentious White House press conference, where the CNN journalist Kaitlan Collins asked Trump about his justice department’s refusal to bring any charges related to the Epstein files. “What would you say to the survivors who feel they haven’t gotten justice?” she asked.

Trump snapped back: “You are the worst reporter. CNN has no ratings because of people like you.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile,” he continued. “I’ve known you for 10 years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face … You know why you’re not smiling? Because you know you’re not telling the truth. And you’re a very dishonest organization, and they should be ashamed of you.”

Kimmel said in response: “We are now at the ‘women-should-smile-more’ stage of his presidency.”

He added: “I’m trying to think of a worse time to tell a woman to smile more than when that person is a reporter asking about the Epstein victims. I can’t.”

Stephen Colbert

On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert looked into the backlash to Bad Bunny’s upcoming Super Bowl half-time show. “The rightwing media have had their panties in a bunch” over the booking for months, he explained, because the Puerto Rican superstar excluded the continental US from his most recent tour out of fear that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could raid the venues, and sings entirely in Spanish.

Speaking to the Athletic, one anonymous NFL player said: “I always think it should be an American. I think they’re trying too hard with this international stuff.”

“I agree – and I bet Bad Bunny agrees too, because he’s an American,” Colbert retorted, before pointing out that in the past, the half-time show has welcomed many non-American artists, including the Canadian singer Shania Twain, the UK’s Rolling Stones or Paul McCartney, and the band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, “who of course hails from the country known as the late 90s, a lawless place where squirrel nut zippers and spin doctors roamed the land, smashing pumpkins with their flaming lips. And many of them did not speak English – people are still trying to decide what language Eddie Vedder is singing.”

In protest and in deference to the Trump administration, the rightwing group Turning Point USA will stage an alternative half-time show starring Kid Rock, titled the All-American Halftime Show.

“Now, if you want to attend this alternate half-time show, you can’t,” said Colbert, because it is unclear what venue will host the show. “Which I believe is fitting,” he added, “because Kid Rock is often unclear on what venue he’s in”.

Seth Meyers

And on Late Night, Seth Meyers recapped Trump’s recent meeting with Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister. After the meeting, Trump said that Modi was “one of my greatest friends”.

“Said Modi: ‘Thank you, that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. We’ve talked like three times,’” Meyers joked.

In a new interview, Trump claimed that Republicans should “nationalize the voting”, because “Trump believes there was no way this wasn’t fraud,” Meyers quipped next to a photo of Bad Bunny winning the Grammy for album of the year, the first time a Spanish-language album has won the night’s top award.

Over the weekend, Trump said that the biggest problem in the US was that Democratic politicians are “soft on crime”.

“As opposed to Trump, who couldn’t be more into it,” Meyers joked next to a photo of Trump’s mugshot.

And according to an analysis from the New York Times, the new batch of Epstein files released on Friday – more than 3m documents – contained 5,300 references to Trump. “Of course, that doesn’t prove anything. I’ve mentioned him way more than 5,300 times, but he’s never been here,” Meyers laughed.