Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel returned on Monday after the writer's strike ended. He told his audience that the crew knew that they were back to work when their parents began sending text messages with notes for the show. "Please don't make the whole monologue about Trump," Kimmel read from Josh's mom.

"That is a no-can-do. I am backed up like you cannot believe," said Kimmel. "And he's taunting us. He was here in California over the weekend for a fundraiser."

Kimmel played a clip of Trump talking about the low-flow showers in California, which he said means rich people in Beverly Hills stink.

"That ridiculous man had the nuclear codes for four years," Kimmel recalled. "Wait until he finds out about the showers in prison.

Another comment Kimmel loved was Trump saying that now California has had all the rain, they should use it to keep their forests damp so they don't catch on fire.

"Supporters from all around the southland paid $600 a pop for bright new ideas like this," said Kimmel. "He is so right. Why didn't we think of dampening the forest? That should be his slogan for 2024. DTF,  dampen the forests."   Kimmel then turned to the indictments.  

"Trump is now facing 91 felony counts. Ninety-one felony counts," he said to audience applause. "It's like all of Melania's birthday wishes come true at once. Every time something Trump happened in the news, I would get texts asking me if I was bummed we didn't have a show that night, and mostly, I was fine. But the one that really got me was when they booked Trump in Georgia, and he self-reported his weight at 215 pounds. I almost crossed the picket line for that. If I were the judge in the case he has going in New York right now, I'd start the trial by saying, 'Look, we're going to get to the fraud thing, but first? Hop up on this scale, big fellow.' If he's 215 pounds, that means he is 30 pounds lighter than his last physical. When he was president, he was 245 pounds. Which means he is either lying or the colonel is now frying his chicken in Ozempic."  

He went on to talk about the mugshot, how serious Trump looked, and the way he turned it into a money-maker.

"And he made a t-shirt out of it to sell to his fans. Now, this, to me, is classic Donald Trump. He's selling a 'Never Surrender' shirt with a picture of him

in the act of surrendering on it," Kimmel cracked up. Kimmel played the clip of Trump at the courthouse in Manhattan Monday when he ranted about the assessment value of his properties.

"Only Donald Trump would try to inflate the value of his assets while on trial for inflating the value of his assets," he said. The monologue continued with the weird clip Raw Story posted Sunday in which Trump goes on a weird rant about wanting to be electrified if he was in a sinking boat. In true Kimmel style, he slowed down the video to highlight the slur of Trump pronouncing "electrocution."  See the clip of the opener below or at the link here.

 

 

Trump knows he's lost — so he's using the New York case for his campaign: reporter     Story by Sarah K. Burris •11h

Economics reporter and Donald Trump biographer Tim O'Brien thinks that the former president already knows that he's lost the New York case. According to O'Brien, the image of Trump as a business tycoon has been swapped for a more lucrative persona, and that's as a cult leader.

Speaking to MS NBC's Joy Reid on Monday after the day's proceedings, O'Brien reinforced what another biographer, David Cay Johnston, said about Trump's knack for lying about his financial worth. Johnston said Trump told him he was worth $3 billion, but then told O'Brien he was worth $6 billion, but struggled to figure out where the financial proof of that was.

"Trump inflated his wealth because he is a deeply insecure person about his business prowess and his track record," said O'Brien. "He saw it as a scorecard that he used to compare himself to other wealthy people in the United States. That's why he always lobbied for it, but it also served a business purpose, as we know. It put him in front of bankers who otherwise might not have been dealing with him. And he got away with that for a long time because I think the media treated it like a game. Law enforcement didn't see any harm in it, and bankers during a certain period were afraid to take him on because he would savage them in the press." 

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He noted that banks ultimately washed their hands of him because he was known for filing for bankruptcy six times for five different companies. He also failed to pay back some of his loans and pay for other things. So, banks walked away from him, said O'Brien.

"What you're seeing in this courtroom right now is decades of this," O'Brien continued. "Donald Trump started doing this in the 1970s. He is a 77-year-old man who is finally being held to account for behaviour he got away with for a long time because no one cared until he became president."

He explained that it also is part of the "unravelling of his family's business roots to New York." The elder Frank Trump built the family's empire and helped set his son up in business. He then bailed Trump out multiple times.

"I don't think he's going to stay in business," said O'Brien about the future of Trump's enterprise. "Fraud is a foregone conclusion. All we're talking about now are the kind of the scale of the penalties that are going to be assessed against him."

 

Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen told Raw Story last week that Attorney General Letitia James' estimated penalty of $250 million is only the baseline, not the ceiling, because there could be interest on the fines.

Trump "is not acting like someone who thinks he has a good story to tell," said O'Brien. "He's acting like someone who is cornered, and caged, and afraid, and lashing out at the judge and lashing out at Letitia James. And I think it's because he feels he has nowhere else to go. I think the other thing to be aware of is he rose to fame in public attention around the idea that he was a self-made entrepreneurial genius, and then he became a television celebrity. He's a shape-sifter. And he's now transitioned away from being a businessman into being the leader of a political cult. And I think when he's making these appeals in the courtroom, it's not as a businessman. He's trying to appeal to his political base because

he knows he's had it in this courtroom, I think."    Re: Commended Links:   ・Trump calls sons 'idiots' and will likely throw them under the bus in New York case: biographer  ・Trump is raging that he won't get a jury trial in New York — but that was his choice

・Trump rants: 'I'm going to court tomorrow morning to fight for my name and reputation.'    What A Lying, Corrupt Loser Would Be Wanna to Be a Dictator. So Sad But True.