The president and his allies have never really had a great relationship with the world of late night shows and their hosts. Alec Baldwin has famously portrayed Donald Trump himself on Saturday Night Live, and the man who is now president was so repulsed at the performances that he suggested the show should be taken off the air.
Those comments, of course, don’t just situate in a context of Trump’s hatred of late night hosts. He has also long maintained an active hatred of the media as a whole, suggesting at one point that NBC should have its broadcast license revoked.
Fast forwarding to the present, Jimmy Kimmel has taken the president’s ongoing back burner feud with late night hosts to a new level. During a segment on his show this week, he quipped that he’s going to file a complaint against the Trump Organization over the fact that at least two of its products do not display country of origin information. For the federal government to rule in Kimmel’s favor would mean that the Trump Organization could be forced to pay fines of up to half a million dollars per violation, as the popular late night host noted.
His comments to that effect came in the context of a bit on the Trump Organization’s “official store,” from which Kimmel bought an array of items. He brought those items out in front of his studio audience and went through them, noting just what a large portion of them were made in China.
Two of the items — a mocked up gold bar coin bank and a pet bandana — had no country of origin listed on either the products themselves or their packaging.
Kimmel, after reading off the rules requiring imported goods to be labeled with a country of origin, commented as follows:
‘This could be very expensive. Not to mention embarrassing. Are they even capable of shame? I mean Trump’s whole platform is about American companies, his company isn’t even supporting America! You know what I’m going to do? I’m sure Eric and Don Jr. didn’t know about this. I’m sure this was a simple oversight. I’ll just file an official complaint and let them sort it all out.’
Check out video of the segment below. Kimmel’s reference to Eric and Donald Jr. is because of the fact that the president’s two eldest sons are helping lead the family business in their father’s absence.
The president has claimed an allegiance to American businesses to the point of imposing hefty tariffs on much imported steel and aluminum — and yet here we are anyway, with his company selling products made overseas.
Kimmel’s segment on the issue is hardly the first time that a late night host has made a significant foray into political or social issues outside of their normal jokes about them.
For instance, Kimmel himself has occasionally emotionally weighed in on a pressing national issue, such as that of last year’s mass shooting at a Las Vegas country music festival.
On the more procedural side of things, Kimmel’s fellow late night host John Oliver was once reported to have crashed the website of the Federal Communications Commission after he sent people to comment against the then-impending repeal of net neutrality.
The FCC eventually claimed the site outage was due to attacks and not just a natural influx of comments.
Featured Image via Screenshot from the Video
