Obama and Madonna on ‘Fallon’: Making Trump Jokes, Getting Serious

President Obama paid a visit to The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Thursday night and mixed the usual Fallon tomfoolery with some serious comments about the state of the Presidential election. Madonna also turned up, but fortunately did not join in on the political discussion.

Obama began by, predictably, slow-jamming the news with Fallon.

During their sit-down chat, Obama initially made a joke about presumptive nominee Donald Trump. Asked if he thought the Republicans were happy with their choice of Trump, Obama deadpanned, “We are, but I don’t know how they’re feeling.” Big laughs from the audience. Then Obama grew serious. “Actually, I am worried about the Republican party… You want somebody who could do the job if they win, who understands the issues… But what’s happened in that party, culminating in this current nomination, is not actually good for the country as a whole and not something the Democrats should wish for. My hope is that maybe once you get through this current cycle, there’s some corrective action and they get back to being a center-right party and the Democratic party a center-left party, and we figure out how to work together again.”

At the time of the Fallon taping, Obama had not publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton as he has now done, so on the Tonight Show, his remarks about Clinton and Bernie Sanders were neutral, noting that he thought it was “a healthy thing for the Democratic party to have a contested primary” and that Bernie had made Hillary “a better candidate.” Fallon’s main contribution to this entire discussion was to try and make a joke about Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, saying it was not a common name. No one so much as snickered.

Madonna closed out the show with a performance of one of her best early hits, “Borderline” — a slowed-down, funky version with Questlove on drums. Thank goodness she or Fallon didn’t have time to ask whether she was making a veiled reference to Trump’s own America-Mexico borderline issues.

The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. on NBC.