Late-night hosts react to the midterm election results with a mix of glee and sharp mockery, as a Democratic wave delivered what several comics framed as a stinging rebuke to President Donald Trump. On Thursday night, Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon led the charge, turning the Republican losses into punchlines that targeted Trump’s response and the sudden shift in Washington.
Kimmel, on Jimmy Kimmel Live, opened with a quip that cast Trump as a peripheral figure in his own political defeat. He said Americans had treated the president “like he was the East Wing of the White House,” then celebrated the outcome with an exaggerated call: “We did it! Transgender for everyone!” The line drew on the night’s broader Democratic victories, which Kimmel portrayed as a clear rejection of Trump’s influence.
The host also mocked Trump’s post-election social media activity, recounting that the president had written that he was not on the ballot and that a landslide would have occurred if he were. Kimmel’s response was blunt: “Oh, shut up.” He continued, asking Trump to “give us a break for one day” and calling him a “spoiled child” while questioning whether the president had ever learned “manners or sportsmanship or simple common decency.”
Over on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon took a different angle, imagining how Democrats might have celebrated their wins. He joked that they had thrown “a huge victory party in Trump’s ballroom,” a reference to the president’s penchant for hosting events at his properties. Fallon then added that the defeats were so severe that “this morning Trump didn’t even want to get out of his tanning bed,” a line that played on Trump’s well-known tan.
Fallon returned to the electoral math with a summary that tied the wave to Trump’s central role in the midterms: “It was a total blue wave caused by an orange president.” He closed with a joke about the expected exodus of Republicans from Congress, saying there would be so many leaving the Capitol that “it’ll look like a reverse Jan. 6”—a reference to the 2021 attack on the Capitol, flipped to suggest a mass departure rather than an intrusion.
The two hosts’ segments were part of a broader late-night response to the midterms, with several shows addressing the Democratic sweep and the Republican losses. The jokes centered on Trump’s inability to escape blame, the scale of the Democratic victories, and the sudden change in political momentum. For Kimmel and Fallon, the results offered a rare moment of comedic catharsis—and a chance to needle a president who had spent the campaign season as the central figure in the national conversation.
