Jimmy Kimmel’s English Tea And Biscuits Address

Saturday, 27 December 2025, 3:47 pm
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Contrary to what the humorless Donald Trump says Jimmy Kimmel is funny. That is, he’s funny on his own show. Perhaps because he wasn’t going for laughs in his Christmas chat to the Brits, his short address fell flat.

It was too dry and cool, when what was called for was some heat and light. It was too much inside baseball, when the English play cricket.

While comedians bubble-wrap speaking truth to power with humor, social commentators often come off as simply living in a bubble.

Kimmel missed the point on two basic truths about America. Yes, “we’re not all like him. We’re not all like that.” But enough Americans are like our poor excuse for a president and a human being to elect him twice, with four years to contemplate the egregious mistake in between.

Therefore it’s irrelevant that “we’re not all like him,” because the issue is the rot at the core of this country that put this cruel narcissist in power twice. Kimmel, and no one else in America are saying that. And some, like the talking heads at MS Now, are repeating ad nauseum the frightfully premature line that Trumpism is on its way out.

Propaganda still predominates in America over seeing and saying things as they are. All propaganda is fake news, whether it’s from the blatant liars on the extreme right, or the “counter-narratives” from what passes for the left in the United States.

And that’s where Kimmel and his wishful-thinking compatriots resort to a lie: “We’re going through a bit of a wobble right now, but we’ll come around…Give us about three years.”

We’re not going through a “wobble.” We’re having a reckoning without a realization, and a realization without a reckoning.

Many people are doing what they can to resist, for example, the deliberate brutality of Trump’s ICE thugs scooping up any person of color that looks like they may be undocumented (and ensnaring documented immigrants and even citizens in their malicious nets). But the underlying source of Trump’s ascendency to the highest office in the land remains unexamined.

Just as Trump is a manifestation of the inner reality of America, and not an anomaly or “wobble,” Trumpism is not the cause of what ails us, but the sepsis that is the final stage of infection. Liberals are diddling around with symptoms when the body politic urgently needs an infusion of powerful antibiotics.

The falsehood that “this isn’t who we are” is both denial and delay. The disease of Trumpism is what we have become as a people. Only by facing things as they are, and ourselves, can we cure ourselves of it.

Yet the liberal media continues to personalize the pestilence that is Trumpism, rejoicing at “the diminished social and political importance of Trump,” even as his vile and vicious policies gain momentum at home and abroad.

America’s allies, especially in Europe, also continue to misread the international situation. They adhere to half-truths such as, “Amid this chaos there has been one consistent target for Trump’s contempt: the constraints imposed by international law, and its value system built around national sovereignty, including the prohibition of the use of force to change external borders.”

That’s a basic misreading of the psychological and political crisis facing humankind that Trumpism has catalyzed. As Majed al-Ansari, the foreign policy adviser to Qatar’s prime minister has said, we are “moving from a world order to disorder.”

Elaborating, he adds, “I don’t think we are moving towards a multipolar system. I don’t think we are even moving to a power-based international order. I don’t think we are moving towards any kind of system. We are moving into a system where anybody can do whatever they like, regardless if they are big or small. As long as you have the ability to wreak havoc, you can do it because no one will hold you accountable.”

One of the few advantages of living at the edge of America, circling faster and faster on the event horizon of a black hole, is that one can see the entire human past as it’s compressed into the present. The present slows to a crawl as you stare into the abyss of humanity’s future without radical change at all levels.

Antiquated concepts and frameworks like national sovereignty and national identity have become twisted and warped into fascistic political movements worldwide. It’s the same old story but with enough difference in a global society that the slow motion collapse of not just the post-World War II order but the Westphalian Order is unseen.

So no Jimmy, we don’t have three years in America to fiddle as Washington burns down the old order it largely created. And neither does the rest of humanity.

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail