By GRACE SMITH
Popular night time show host Jimmy Kimmel announced he planned to file a federal complaint against the Trump family’s new Trump Store.
A screen capture from Jimmy Kimmel’s show clip on YouTube where he presents the box and letter from the Trump Store.
The talk show host of has been vocal about calling out the Trump administration’s policy issues and controversial political decisions.
On the latest episode of his show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” questioned Trump’s “Buy American!” rhetoric.
It has been a phrase the president has pushed since the beginning of the election and most recently reiterated while moving for high foreign tariffs.
Kimmel expressed agreement with the idea of supporting American businesses and manufacturers, and also stated that Trump’s sons, who run the brand new online Trump Store, seemed to hold the belief t even stronger than he did.
As a test, he ordered several items from their merchandise site and found that all of them were made in China, though several left out the country of origin. Kimmel stated that an omission of such could bring around half a million dollars in fines and he has already filed a federal complaint against the store.
Though he expressed this as a honest move to fix a possible oversight, the action will surely bring to light the two-sided nature of Trump’s words.
One of the items from the online store, a coin bank, with no marked country of origin.
But the most interesting part of this story is not the federal complaint placed but the way Kimmel laid out and physically showed the lack of American-made products from the Trump Store. I
n a way very unique to television he was able to open a box from the legitimate store and show the inscriptions, embroidery and tags (or lack of) describing the Chinese, Peruvian, or Taiwanese origin of the products. He ordered everything from a golf club cover to a baby’s bib and did a simplistically wonderful way of showing the range of places these items came from.
John Oliver, host of “Last Week with John Oliver,” often directly presents reports, interviews and documents while exposing politicians.
In an age where the public has become less and less trusting of news and entertainment media and gravitates toward sensationalized stories, flashy headlines and personal echo chambers, the earnest and straight-forward way Kimmel presented the physical evidence can not be denied by even the most staunch Trump supporter.
Many late-night talk shows have begun to take this approach when it comes to politics and cite specific phrases from government guidelines and show actual documents of fraud, theft or deceit.
It seems in an age of appeal over quality, this is the only way to keep people from blindly believing whatever Twitter headline they come across next. No one can deny cold, hard presentation like that.