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LATE NIGHT US TV host Jimmy Kimmel was on a family holiday to Ireland during last week’s presidential election and joked that “no one seemed terrified”.
He took a break from Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC to come to Ireland on a big family vacation.
“My kids, my brother and his kids, my sister and her kids, my parents, my granddaughter… we packed up the whole family and went to Ireland.”
Kimmel said he got a chance to see the house where his father’s great-grandparents were born in Co Mayo.
During the opening monologue to Tuesday night’s show, Kimmel said he has a lot of family in Mayo and that he “found them on ancestry.com”.
“Which could go either way, you know,” he joked, “but we had a great time with them.”
Kimmel said he didn’t realise until he arrived in Ireland that there was a presidential election on the way.
“We were there during their presidential election and no one seemed terrified,” said Kimmel.
He then put up a photo of Catherine Connolly and Heather Humphreys shaking hands during the final debate of the presidential campaign.
“What about this photograph feels different to you?
“Two women, yes, that’s a big one,” said Kimmel, “but also they’re sharing a warm embrace.
“Connolly won, and get this, her opponent said, ‘Catherine will be a president for all of us, and she will be my president and I really would like to wish her all the very, very best’.
“No caps, no whining about the election being rigged. Makes you wonder, what’s wrong with these people?”
Trump has repeatedly claimed that his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden was “rigged”, often doing so in all-caps posts on his Truth social media platform.
Meanwhile, Kimmel said everyone he met while in Ireland was a “delight” and that he had “not one bad experience with anyone”.
“My niece left her purse at a pub and a woman she never met figured out where she was staying and drove it to our hotel, then refused to accept money for it.
“She seemed confused about the idea that my niece would even offer her money for it.
“They don’t know that we have more of a hostage-type situation,” joked Kimmel.
He also said he met a lot of people who watch his show and quipped that people in Ireland are “very worried” about what’s going on in the US under president Donald Trump.
“In case you’re wondering what other countries think about what’s going on here in our country, I’ll tell you – they’re worried about us, they’re very worried.
“They’re worried about us in the same way you worry about a nephew who maybe you haven’t seen for a few years and shows up at Thanksgiving missing all his front teeth.”
He said people in Ireland “had a lot of questions I couldn’t answer, like, ‘why is he (Trump) knocking down the White House?’
“I don’t know, nobody knows, I don’t think he even knows,” said Kimmel.
This was in reference to Trump demolishing the East Wing of the White House to make way for a $300 million ballroom that is nearly twice the size of the White House.
Last month, Kimmel’s show was briefly suspended following a comment he made regarding the shooting of Charlie Kirk.
Kimmel had joked that Trump’s response to Kirk’s death was more akin to how a child grieves for a goldfish than an adult friend.
ABC’s parent company Disney said that it made the decision to suspend the show to “avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country”.
It added that some of the comments made by Kimmel were “ill-timed and thus insensitive”.
However, Disney added that it had “thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show”.
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