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Jimmy Kimmel has roasted Donald Trump for claiming, during his address to Congress, that the US government spent $8m on making mice “transgender”.
Trump made the wildly incorrect claim and a series of other bold accusations during his speech to Congress on Tuesday (4 March) night. He used the speech to highlight several initiatives he’s started in his first six weeks in office.
During his address, Trump complained about the amount of money the United States has spent on certain projects under Joe Biden including: “$8m to promote LGBT+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of, $60m for indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombian empowerment in Central America. $8m for making mice transgender. This is real.”
On his show on Wednesday (5 March), Kimmel pointed out that Trump’s statement about the mice was not true.
In his opening monologue, the TV host said: “You know, you hear the president of the United States say we’re spending $8 million to do sex change operations on mice. You say, ‘Well, I’m sure he’s exaggerating, but there must be something there.‘ Turns out there’s not. It’s not real.”
Kimmel explained: “The government spent money on transgenic mice, which are genetically modified mice they use in lab tests to study disease. It has nothing to do with being transgender.”
Continuing, Kimmel asked: “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 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.”
“It has been nothing but swift and unrelenting action,” Trump said of his opening weeks in office. “The people elected me to do the job, and I am doing it.”
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However, many of his comments included false and misleading information – on topics such as immigration, the economy, and army recruitment – which led to him being fact-checked.
At one point he repeated false claims that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old are receiving Social Security payments, prompting some Democrats to shout, “Not true!” and “Those are lies!”
