On Thursday, Mike Pence made an appearance at a Virginia nursing home to help deliver boxes of personal protective equipment—and now a late-night host is apologizing for his commentary on it. On his show Thursday night, Jimmy Kimmel aired a video that originally ran on C-SPAN showing the vice president personally wheeling boxes to the door of the Woodbine Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in Alexandria, then lifting them off the cart and placing them on the ground, per the Hill. Pence was "doing his best to lift them—what a hero," Kimmel snarked. The reason for Kimmel's sarcastic remark: He then shows a continuation of that clip in which Pence can be seen returning to a van, at which point he's told the boxes left inside were empty. "Well, can I carry the empty ones? Just for the camera?" Pence says, to laughter, apparently caught on a hot mic.
"Mike Pence pretending to carry empty boxes of PPEs into a hospital is the perfect metaphor for who he is and what's doing—a big box of nothing delivering another box of nothing." The Kimmel clip then went viral. Except, as a fact check by USA Today notes, Kimmel ran only part of the C-SPAN video, which showed Pence shut the door of the van and never pretended to lift the empty boxes; he'd only been joking. "This is absolute garbage spread by @JimmyKimmel," a communications rep for Pence tweeted. Kimmel deleted the video and offered what Vanity Fair calls a "backhanded apology." "It would appear that @vp was joking about carrying empty boxes for a staged publicity stunt," Kimmel tweeted. "The full video reveals that he was carrying full boxes for a staged publicity stunt. My apologies. I know how dearly this administration values truth." (More Jimmy Kimmel stories.)
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