Comedian, Oscars host, and Donald Trump antagonist Jimmy Kimmel launched a special attack on the former President — an attack aimed specifically at stalwart Republicans beyond the reach of his regular audience.
“I would like you to send this to a Republican you love and respect,” Kimmel said to his regular viewers, “with a request that they watch the whole thing as a personal favor to you.”
Then with a lightly delivered but heavy-hearted 19-minute monologue, Kimmel served up a pre-packaged dinner table argument against Trump for anti-Trumpers frustrated by loved ones who inexplicably continue to support the Republican candidate.
Presenting himself as a well-meaning messenger, Kimmel kicked things off with a Biden joke and a reference to his old job on The Man Show, a platform that he implied appealed a bit more to the MAGA sensibility than his current gig.
“We had a pretty good relationship back then,” Kimmel said, speaking to the Trump-leaners who’d been invited to his monologue by their friends and family.
Framing his message as a sort of Public Service Announcement, Kimmel asked Harris supporters to share it with their Trump-leaning friends and relatives, a last ditch effort to break through the media echo chamber by using friends and colleagues.
On YouTube alone, Kimmel’s segment was viewed nearly 3.5 million times in its first 16 hours online. No telling, of course, about the political affiliations of those viewers, nor whether Kimmel achieved his goal and effectively reached across what has become an American chasm, not just a divide.
Many of the comments, which might signal a crossover impact, do ostensibly represent the views of Harris-voting Republicans — the top comment in this vein itself has nearly 300 replies.
But many of these GOP defector comments, at least on YouTube, appear to be generated by bots, making it a challenge to determine whether Kimmel’s desire to reach MAGA-inclined voters came to folly or success.