Tim Walz joins Stephen Colbert, Kimmel skewers Trump over Epstein

“So your car is running a little rough, it's still running, but there are things you can do,” said Walz, sitting at a table at the Johnson Hall coffeehouse in key Bucks County, Pennsylvania. “And now, if it’s an older vehicle, you can have the carburetor cleaned. You can invest the money in a really important part, for example the carburettor, in the middle class. You have invested a little in this carburetor. The entire vehicle runs better. This brings oxygen into the entire system.”

He added: “So you invest in the middle class… the middle class makes everything else work.”

Of course, it wouldn't be a Walz interview if there wasn't also a sports metaphor.

“We know we’re in the last two minutes of this game,” he told Colbert. “We will give 110 percent, we know that we have to leave it on the field because democracy is at stake here.”

Jimmy Kimmel, however, struck a darker, more menacing tone on the eve of the election. The “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” host drew attention to tapes released over the weekend by The Daily Beast in which Jeffrey Epstein, the high-profile financier who killed himself while awaiting trial on child trafficking charges, told author Michael Wolff that he was Donald Trump's best friend for ten years.

Kimmel said he was shocked that Epstein's comments about Trump, made two years before Epstein was found dead in his prison cell in 2019, had received so little attention.

“Do you remember Mitt Romney going down for putting a dog carrier on the roof of his car? We just saw a hundred hours of Jeffrey Epstein saying he and Trump were best friends,” Kimmel said. “I didn’t even get a notification about it on my phone. I didn’t get a text message about it.”

Kimmel added: “Do you know what a moron you have to be for Jeffrey Epstein to say you have no moral compass? It’s like R. Kelly is mad at you for leaving the toilet seat up.”

Mark Shanahan can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @MarkAShanahan.