Jimmy Kimmel on Trump’s new press secretary: ‘attorney in the way George Santos was volleyball champion’

With other hosts still on holiday, Jimmy Kimmel checked in on Donald Trump’s record-low poll numbers and beleaguered new press secretary, Katie Zacharia.

Jimmy Kimmel

“We are only 19 days away from our president claiming that the elections were rigged,” said Kimmel on Thursday evening. “Never mind the fact that he is the one trying to rig them, of course.”

“Republicans got some very bad tidings from the fake liberal media,” as even the president’s former favorite, Fox News, predicts that Democrats will flip the House in the midterms.

The network “also betrayed daddy” with a new poll that said his approval rating is now at 36%, its lowest point ever, while traffic to Trump’s social media site, Truth Social, is down 30% year to year. “He seems to be the only one who posts to Truth Social,” said Kimmel. “And I seem to be the only one who reads those posts on Truth Social. It’s really just the two of us.”

“Don Jr hasn’t posted on Truth Social in two months,” he added. “Even Eric hasn’t posted since July. His own stupid sons have forsaken him!”

“But people are still showing up by the dozens to see him in person,” the host continued. “Trump has been touring and boring the country all this month, to remind voters what an amazing job he thinks he’s doing, and to castigate the fake news for not turning the cameras around to show the size of his crowds.”

At one of his rallies on Thursdays, Trump pursued such a point in his usual nonlinear fashion and wondered: “Is the camera like, statutory? Is it like a statue, you cannot move it?”

“Statutory – it’s a word he learned from his best friend Jeffrey Epstein,” Kimmel joked.

In other Trump news, the president announced that he would be cancelling Pete Hegseth’s plans to livestream a military execution by firing squad, because there are “many very good and well-meaning people would rather not watch him die”.

The execution of Nidal Hasan, a former army major and psychiatrist who shot and killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood in 2009, was set for 3 December. But Trump “had second thoughts after realizing that the man they would be executing is in a wheelchair”, Kimmel explained. “I guess he realized he’d have a hard time selling ads on a live stream of a paralyzed man being executed by firing squad, and what’s the point if he can’t make a little bit of money on it, right?”

“I wonder if he’ll show the same kind of mercy to his new future former press secretary,” Kimmel quipped, referring to Zacharia, Trump’s new press secretary whose first week on the job was less than stellar.

On Thursday, the former fringe network commentator tried to set the record state on questions about her statue as an attorney, and “it turns out that Katie Zacharia is an attorney in the same way George Santos was a volleyball champion,” Kimmel quipped. Zacharia has yet to confirm when or where she passed the bar exam; the Wall Street Journal reported that Zacharia failed the California bar exam after graduating from law school there in 2011.

“His press secretary is supposed to be answering questions about his lies, not hers!” Kimmel added. “But the truth is, he didn’t hire her to be his lawyer. He didn’t really hire her to be his press secretary. He hired her so he could squeeze into a helicopter with her and Natalie” – Harp, his fellow blond assistant – “and rub his cankles against a woman’s legs without getting cursed out in Slovenian.”