Jimmy Kimmel on Jeffrey Epstein tapes about Trump friendship

In a series of newly released tapes posted this weekend by the Daily Beast, convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein is heard talking to author Michael Wolff about his relationship with Donald Trump. In the tapes, Epstein tells Wolff that he was Trump’s best friend for a decade and recounts plenty of their scandalous exploits.

Audio clips from Wolff’s August 2017 interview with Epstein — two years before he was found dead in a jail cell — can be found on the Daily Beast’s website. These are the kind of shocking revelations that would normally torpedo a political campaign. But as “Jimmy Kimmel Live” host Jimmy Kimmel noted during his Monday night monologue, it doesn’t make any difference.

“We heard a bombshell tape where Jeffrey Epstein says he was Trump’s ‘closest friend’ and shares a bunch of crazy stories — this hardly moves the needle,” Kimmel noted. “Remember when Mitt Romney went down because he put a dog carrier on the roof of his car? We just got a hundred hours of Jeffrey Epstein saying he and Trump were BFFs. I didn’t even get a warning about that on my phone. I have no texts about this.”

Kimmel noted that Wolff “took his sweet time releasing this information.” He pointed out that Epstein at one point described Trump as having “no moral compass.” Kimmel shuddered: “You know what kind of lowlife you have to be for Jeffrey Epstein to say you have no morals? It’s like if R. Kelly got mad at you for leaving the toilet seat up.”

He added: “But none of the many child welfare lawyers who wear his hats seem to care about any of this. The truth means next to nothing.”

Wolff investigated his book “Fire and Fury” while interviewing Epstein in 2017. (The Trump campaign, for its part, called the tapes “false smears” and “election interference” in a statement to the Daily Beast).

Kimmel shared footage of a rally in Pennsylvania where Trump joked about reporters being shot. “I don’t know, at least he’s being honest for once,” Kimmel said.

He then noted Trump spokesman Stephen Cheung’s attempt to explain that the statement had nothing to do with the media being harmed” (even though Trump very clearly says in the clip that he “wouldn’t mind” journalists being shot) .

“Spoken like a proud Trump University graduate,” Kimmel said.

Meanwhile, Kimmel ended his monologue with a closing argument to the American public: Let’s move on from the drama and the stress.

“Forget about which side you’re on,” he said. “I want you to take a moment to imagine a world where you wake up in the morning, you check the news, and nobody says the words ‘Donald’ or ‘Trump.’ Just a lot of normal, boring stuff. Would don’t be nice? No red hats. You check the sport – off to work. Let’s remove this polyp from our collective national colon and move on already. And don’t forget to vote!”