Jimmy Kimmel continued to roast Donald Trump‘s address to Congress on his ABC late-night talk show. During Kimmel’s March 5 episode, the host lambasted Trump for egregiously lying about how Joe Biden’s administration spent “$8 million on making mice transgender.” Trump said “this is real,” to which Kimmel fired back: “No, it’s not real.”
“You know, you hear the president of the United States say we’re spending $8 million to do sex change operations on mice,” Kimmel said. “You say, ‘Well, I’m sure he’s exaggerating, but there must be something there.‘ Turns out there’s not. It’s not real.”
“The government spent money on transgenic mice, which are genetically modified mice they use in lab tests to study disease,“ Kimmel explained. ”It has nothing to do with being transgender. Other than the word, the ‘trans’ part of the word. You think they know this and just ignore it, or are they so dumb they don’t know how to Google? Or maybe they think we’re so dumb we don’t know how to Google? I don’t know.”
“They’re turning Mickeys into Minnies and Minnies into Mickeys!” Kimmel then joked. “No, they’re just trying to cure dementia and heart disease, which you would think Trump would be for seeing as how they are both coming for him real soon.”
Trump’s claim that Biden spent $8 million on making mice transgender was widely fact-checked by outlets such as CNN, which reported that the government had the “differences in the ways an HIV vaccine worked in mice that had received cross-sex hormone therapy.” The studies were “not for the purpose of making mice transgender” but for figuring out “how these treatments might affect the health of humans who take them.”
As reported by Variety, Trump‘s address to Congress reached an average of 36.6 million viewers, which is about 13% above Joe Biden’s most recent State of the Union address (32.2 million viewers in 2024). But Trump’s latest address was down from his previous high of 47.7 million viewers for his 2017 State of the Union.
Watch Kimmel’s full monologue on Trump’s address in the video below.
