After nearly a year of watching Fox News sh*t disturbers like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Brian Kilmeade pretend as if we’re all making too big of a deal over the deadly Capitol insurrection on January 6th, it’s hard not to feel at least a little bit of satisfaction in knowing that those very same people spent much of that day begging Donald Trump to do something—anything—to stop it. Jimmy Kimmel was particularly tickled that it was Liz Cheney who got to expose these sniveling hypocrites.
On Tuesday night, Kimmel gave a succinct reminder of “what went down, or more accurately did not go down, on January 6th. You may remember [that] for three hours, Trump just hung out saying nothing while a violent crowd attacked the Capitol. He was watching from the White House, soaking it all in.” But not everyone, including Trump’s closest allies, was so blasé about a violent coup taking place in the middle of a Wednesday while the rest of the world watched on.
On Monday night, Cheney, in her role as vice-chair of the Jan. 6 House Select Committee, shared some choice texts that were sent to then-chief of staff Mark Meadows from a number of the president’s most ardent enablers, begging him to talk some sense into his boss. As Kimmel explained:
“There were a whole bunch of texts from freaked out Republicans trapped in the Capitol and also texts from the gang at Fox News. Sean Hannity, Brian Kilmeade, and Laura Ingraham all texted Mark Meadows urging him to urge Trump to stop the insanity. Gee, if only they had some sort of media outlet where they could have said that publicly.”
While Kimmel noted that Republicans “are furious” with Cheney for “doing the right thing” by bringing these pleas to the public’s attention, he also thinks that “listening to [Cheney] read these texts aloud, it’s as damming as it gets for Donald Trump and the Fox News sycophants who suckle his flabby pink teats.”
Kimmel proceeded to play the clip of Cheney reading the Fox News tweets, then intercut these with clips of the hosts themselves downplaying the events of January 6th altogether—sort of like how Trump talking about grabbing women “by the p***y” was all just “locker room talk.” Which led Kimmel to conclude that for all the negative things that can and regularly (and rightly) are said about the Fox News gang, we really don’t give them “enough credit for their acting. They’re really good.”
You can watch the full clip above.