President Donald Trump‘s critics voiced their displeasure over his record-breaking State of the Union address, with longtime rival Jimmy Kimmel harping over the speech’s length.
Trump spoke to Congress for 108 minutes, breaking the record of 100 minutes he set last year. He had warned previously that the address would be “a long speech because we have so much to talk about.” Kimmel, with newfound resistance laurels over his brief firing over a joke about assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk, led the charge.
“They do need to hire an orchestra to play him off like the Oscars. At the stroke of 90 minutes, go straight into ‘Y.M.C.A.’ and end it,” Kimmel joked.
“The speech went on so long, Kristi Noem’s dog shot itself,” he said at another point.
Kimmel also compared Trump’s immigration policies to the Holocaust.
“Trump applauded the efforts of a World War II vet who liberated an internment camp, at the same time he is building new ones here in the United States,” he said.
Most other criticisms focused on the speech’s length, driven in part by Trump’s repeated awarding of medals to military servicemen and heckling.
“Oh yeah, I think we’re all expecting that. You’re incapable of being brief. Even if you were just going to read a haiku, I would expect two intermissions,” late-night host Seth Meyers said.
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“Trump told us in advance that the speech was going to be long and, for once, he was telling the truth,” Jimmy Fallon said.
The wider reception of Trump’s speech was predictably divided along partisan lines, with Republicans hailing it as a great address that retook framing around messaging, while Democrats decried it as rambling and incoherent.