This Week's Sneak Peek

The more I think about it, I wish I had used "You're fired" as the punch line for last week's cartoon.

The "indefinite suspension" of Jimmy Kimmel after direct and explicit demands from Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr that ABC cancel Kimmel's late night television show – and after Reichsfuhrer Donald Berzelius Trump promised after Colbert's cancelation that Kimmel would be next – was the real story of the week, not social media's wild speculation as to the motives of Charlie Kirk's assassin.

Somebody must get Carr to answer what exactly, was Kimmel's offense. Did he quote the nasty things Kirk has said over the years after George Floyd was killed, or Paul Pelosi was attacked? Did he mock him for saying that school shootings and the other thousands of gun deaths every year were worth it to keep Second Amendment rights? Did he say that Kirk deserved what he got?

No, no, and no.

You don't have to judge Kimmel by the no-context chyrons on the evening news, or the ten-second clip shared by Colbert, Fallon, Meyers, Oliver, et al. Here is how Kimmel's final monologue actually went:

"We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

"In between the finger pointing there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level you can see how hard the President is taking this."

The late-night host then played a clip of President Trump being asked how he has been holding up since the killing, to which Trump responds: "I think very good" and begins to talk about plans for the new White House ballroom.

The show then cuts back to Kimmel, who continues: "Yes, he's at the fourth stage of grief; construction.

"Demolition..construction...

"This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend, this is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish, ok. And it didn't just happen once".

The host then played another clip of the President on Fox News revealing the moment he was told Kirk had been shot while he was with the architects for the new White House ballroom.

The show cuts back to Kimmel, who says: "And then we installed the most beautiful chandelier...[inaudible] you wouldn't believe.

"There's something wrong with him — there really is. I mean, who thinks like that and why are we building a $200million ballroom in the White..., Is it possible that he is doing it intentionally, so we can be mad about that instead of the Epstein list?

"By the time he's out of office, the White House will have slot machines and a water slide.

"Trump is in major change the subject mode, on Friday he stopped by the always friendly morning crew at Fox. Whenever Trump goes on Fox & Friends it's funny because the hosts are so eager for him to be reasonable, they spell it all out for him. They desperately want to avoid having to nod along with anything crazy or contradict him so they give him the question, and their preferred answer too.

Kimmel then plays a clip from the Fox & Friends interview where the hosts asked the President: "Is the message too, to the right, the people who are going to go 'I want revenge', not to have revenge, Charlie Kirk would not want revenge?" To which the President responds "he would want revenge at the voter [ballot] box"

The show cuts back to Kimmel, who says: "Good answer right, take it to the ballot box. That's reasonable, that's almost presidential but that's the thing, he can never just stop right there."

The late-night host then plays another clip from the Fox & Friends interview where the President remarks that California "doesn't have ballot boxes."

The show cuts back to Kimmel, who says: "Oh well, in that case begin the purge."

"For the record, we live in California we do have ballot boxes, we've got mail boxes, we have lunch boxes, we have all kinds of boxes, you should come see them sometime, we'll give you a toolbox, you can live in it.

"And then we have this head of the FBI, this character Kash Patel who so far has handled this investigation into the murder of Charlie Kirk like a kid who didn't read the book BS-ing his way through an oral report."

The show cuts to the FBI director on Fox, defending a social media post he made about the arrest of a "subject" in the hours after Kirk was shot, who was later released, telling the show: "I was telling the world what the FBI was doing as we were doing."

The show cut backs to Kimmel, who says: "...which was claiming we caught the killer when we had not.

"Kash Patel always looks like he just got hit by a Volkswagen."

He continues: "The Governor of Utah, Governor Spencer Cox, has been a rare voice of sanity after what happened in his state, he urged Americans to choose humanity, connection and love and even encouraged us to listen to people we disagree with, which is not the plan according to Marjorie Taylor Greene.

"Klan Mom wrote today, 'There's nothing left to talk about with the left, they hate us. They assassinated our nice guy who actually talked to them, peacefully debating ideas. Then millions on the left celebrated and made clear they want all of us dead. To be honest I want a peaceful, national divorce,' the same thing her husband said about two and half years ago.

"But a peaceful national divorce, how would that work? You get Florida, we get Vermont? We share custody of Disney World every other weekend? She's right. The right it feels like we are all stuck in a marriage to Marjorie Taylor Greene right now."