Jimmy Kimmel Can't Save Donald Trump

Jimmy Kimmel just might be #TheResistance’s best hope for showing President Donald Trump the error of his wicked ways—according to Jimmy Kimmel.

On Friday’s Good Morning America, Kimmel told host Amy Robach why he REALLY wants to have the president of the United States as a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live, saying, “I have a lot of questions for Donald Trump.”

Kimmel continued: “Maybe this is crazy, but I feel like I could turn him around on a couple of things…I think he needs to be surrounded by better people.”

“I want to know what happened to the Donald Trump…who was a Democrat?” he added. “I just think he’s changed positions so frequently.”

Riveting stuff.

Kimmel has become something of late night’s moral compass. He shared the story of his infant son’s health crisis as part of an emotional appeal against the GOP’s healthcare bills, and recently, he named and shamed the Republicans who take money from the National Rifle Association and help ensure that Americans that want to buy guns to kill their fellow citizens are able to do so more easily.

Those interventions were heartfelt and worthwhile. Kimmel’s appeal about his son, in particular, packed a punch and probably opened some eyes—mostly belonging to liberals who were tuned into Kimmel in the first place—to the fact that if rich people are negatively affected by this country healthcare system, it must be really pretty bad.

But plenty of otherwise well-meaning people—on both ends of the political spectrum, which is a problem in itself—have given Trump nearly endless room to prove himself reasonable, rational, and human, trying every known method of persuasion to coax him into doing things the way they’ve always been done by all your favorite presidents.

Remember during the 2016 campaign, when it started to look like we weren’t going to have the dynastic face-off we’d been expecting between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush? Commentators from here to eternity scrutinized Trump’s every action for signs of that all-important, intangible “presidential” quality, desperately trying to frame every time he covered his mouth while sneezing as progress in the decorum department.

Over 250 days into his administration, the Kimmels of the world are still waiting in earnest for the presidential Trump to arrive. They don’t seem to be able to accept that it’s not going to happen. Trump is irredeemable.

More importantly, wishing Trump would “surround himself with better people” or “turn himself around on a few things” so that he can become more “presidential” is beside the point. Our most presidential leaders have marched Americans to their deaths on foreign soil, allowed their children to die of opioid overdoses, and ripped away their pensions, savings, and any semblance of middle-class stability while enriching the wealthiest among us. Trump is obviously not the answer, but neither is the decorum he rejects.

That is how we got there—with a gulf between populations of Americans that no establishment figures seems able to navigate—by thinking we can reason away decades of decay, injustice, and death with slogans and a campaign stop every two to four years.

More of the same efforts to reason with a racist buffoon who cares more about grooming his own ego than saving American citizens literally dying without the barest necessities to live absolutely will not save us—even when Jimmy Kimmel is the one trying.

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