Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) met Wednesday night for the first and only vice presidential debate. "This debate is important, because one of these people could be our president someday — for Mike Pence, the day could be tomorrow," Jimmy Kimmel said on Wednesday's Kimmel Live. "Safety was a concern leading up to tonight's debate, seeing as how the White House is now the new Wuhan."
So once the debate started, Kimmel said, "the plexi went up and the gloves came off. I wish Kamala would have started the debate by congratulating Mike Pence on his great work as leader of the COVID task force — and then just laughed like a maniac for 90 minutes." He ran through some of the bigger moments.
"A lot of people noticed that Mike Pence had a pink eye, which is apparently a symptom of coronavirus," Kimmel said. "But the big star of the debate tonight was a fly that landed, quite symbolically, on the vice president's head" — and "stayed on his head for 2 minutes and 3 seconds. Technically, that fly is now his running mate. But anyway, Mike Pence's fly just became the most popular Halloween costume of 2020." Look, he said, "no one's mind was changed tonight, almost none of the questions were answered."
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Yes, the debate "was everything we expected," Stephen Colbert said on The Late Show: "Pence talked over all the women in the room, the moderator tried to call for order, the vice president got a couple of good licks in, and Sen. Harris picked up a broken pool cue and beat Pence over the head with the Trump administration's failures. All night, Pence wouldn't give one straight answer — which is kind of weird, because normally he likes everything straight. It wasn't earth-shattering, but that is how politics should be, remember?"
"Oh, there is one moment that stuck with me," Colbert said. "You'll know it when you see it — everyone's buzzing about it." But before he got to Pence's hair fly, he ran through some key exchanges and mocked Pence's "insane equivalency" between COVID-19 and the 2009 swine flu outbreak, when, he deadpanned, "the economy shut down for a year, we couldn't hug our grandparents for months, and Barack Obama would not shut up about the MyPillow guy." Finally, he landed his fly jokes. Watch below. Peter Weber
