Jimmy Kimmel has called on Donald Trump to resign after Democrats swept control of both chambers of Congress in a devastating midterm defeat for Republicans, unleashing a blistering televised attack on the president’s refusal to accept responsibility for the electoral collapse.
The ABC late-night host devoted much of Wednesday’s monologue to ridiculing Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the results, accusing him of behaving like a spoiled child and insisting that voters had delivered a decisive verdict on his leadership.
“In the face of defeat, he is doing what he does best, blaming everyone other than him,” Kimmel told his studio audience.
The comedian then delivered an unmistakable message to the president.
“Oh, shut up. Just shut up, please,” he said, prompting loud cheers, whistles and applause.
Kimmel branded Trump “a spoiled child” who had never learnt “anything about manners or sportsmanship or simple common decency”, before turning his attention to the president’s extraordinary claim that Republicans would have won by a landslide had his own name appeared on the ballot.
In a Truth Social post following the election, Trump wrote: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
Kimmel dismissed the assertion as “such c**p”, arguing that the results exposed the weakness of candidates personally selected or endorsed by the president.
“All your big handpicked candidates lost,” he said, listing Darline Graham in South Carolina, Thom Tillis’s ousting from the Senate, Ken Paxton in Texas and Vivek Ramaswamy’s failed campaign.
He also pointed to JD Vance, suggesting Trump’s choice of running mate had cost Republicans a Senate seat in Ohio.
Kimmel’s attack became increasingly personal as he argued that Trump had been impossible for voters to ignore throughout the campaign.
“You were on the ballot. You’re like dog hair. You’re on everything,” he said.
“You’ve infected every nook and cranny of our lives. The only time you ever brought us together was yesterday when we all teamed up to get rid of you.”
The host then made his most direct intervention, calling on the president to leave the White House.
“Resign,” he said, as the audience erupted in applause.
“Quit already. Just quit. Nobody wants you. Even you don’t want to be president anymore.”
Kimmel suggested Trump could abandon politics altogether and spend his time enjoying the wealth he had accumulated.
“Take that billion dollars’ worth of crypto, buy an island,” he said, before adding: “Maybe Epstein’s island. Wouldn’t that be a perfect end to this story?”
The monologue followed another fierce attack on Trump during Tuesday’s programme, prompting an angry response from the White House.
Presidential spokesman Davis Ingle had branded Kimmel a “no-talent loser” who had “beclowned himself with tanking ratings” and was “spewing disgusting lies to his dwindling audience”.
Ingle added that “nobody with any common sense would ever watch him unless it was to laugh at him”.
Kimmel was quick to seize on the criticism during Wednesday’s broadcast, turning the White House’s insult into another punchline.
“Which is kind of the point of the show,” he quipped, responding to the suggestion that viewers tuned in to ridicule him.
He then addressed Ingle directly, saying: “The last thing I want to do is tell you how to do your job, Danny Dingle, but today seems like a bad day to call me a loser,” pointing to the scale of the Republican defeat just 24 hours earlier.
Trump, meanwhile, has offered competing messages about the election result. In a telephone interview with the New York Times on Tuesday evening, he appeared conciliatory towards the incoming Democratic majority.
“I am absolutely willing to accept those results,” he said. “We’ll work with the Democrats, and we’ll, you know, look forward to working with them.”
On Truth Social, however, his tone was considerably more defiant, insisting that his absence from the ballot had cost Republicans victory.
Speaking to Fox News, Trump also blamed the Republican candidates themselves, saying he was “a little bit surprised” by the result and had “thought they’d do better”.
He nevertheless warned Democrats that cooperation would have limits, promising to use his presidential veto powers against legislation he opposed.
“The power of veto is one of the stronger powers that a president has, and they’ll send over things that are insane, and I’ll veto them,” he said.
Kimmel’s demand for Trump’s resignation is unlikely to alter the immediate political reality. But the comedian’s attack captures the increasingly public humiliation facing a president whose party has lost control of Congress and whose opponents are preparing to challenge his administration. For Trump, the battle to contain the fallout from the midterms is only beginning.
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