A YouTube video billed as a fresh “live TV” takedown of Donald J. Trump by Jimmy Kimmel and Arnold Schwarzenegger is, in reality, a stitched-together package of older pop-culture flashpoints: late-night jokes about Trump’s self-reported weight in his 2023 Georgia jail booking, a long-running feud over television ratings dating back to “The Apprentice,” and a grab bag of unrelated political commentary and internet speculation.

The most grounded piece of the narrative begins in August 2023, when Trump surrendered at the Fulton County jail in Atlanta in the Georgia election-interference case. His publicly released booking record listed him as 6-foot-3 and 215 pounds, figures that drew wide attention because they were self-reported and differed from prior publicly disclosed measurements.

Kimmel returned to the air on Oct. 2, 2023, after the Writers Guild of America strike paused many late-night shows. His comeback episode included Schwarzenegger as a guest — a choice widely read as deliberate, given Schwarzenegger’s celebrity as a bodybuilder and former governor and Kimmel’s comedic interest in the booking-sheet numbers that had ricocheted across social media.

But the video’s bigger arc depends on a much older grievance: Trump’s fixation on ratings. In early 2017, after Schwarzenegger took over as host of “The New Celebrity Apprentice,” Trump publicly mocked the show’s viewership, calling himself a “ratings machine” and taunting Schwarzenegger for being “swamped.” Schwarzenegger answered with a now-famous rejoinder: a proposed job swap in which Trump would “take over TV” and Schwarzenegger would take the presidency “so people can finally sleep comfortably again.”

That exchange has become a kind of evergreen internet artifact, resurfacing whenever Trump criticizes comedians or media figures. The new video leans on that familiarity, presenting the Kimmel-Schwarzenegger pairing as an enduring pressure point for Trump: a combination of humor and celebrity authority that frames vanity and performance as central to his public persona.

Yet the upload also demonstrates how quickly a political-viral narrative can drift from documentation into spectacle. Alongside the Kimmel and Schwarzenegger material, the video introduces tangential claims — including references to an end-of-year ritual in Peru in which shamans made predictions about world leaders. Reuters and The Associated Press reported that, in late December 2025, shamans in Lima forecast a serious illness for Trump in 2026 and upheaval for Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. Those reports were covered as a cultural curiosity, not as evidence-based forecasting — a distinction that often disappears when such material is repurposed inside partisan video commentary.

What remains, once the extraneous elements are stripped away, is a familiar American loop: Trump attacks entertainers; entertainers mock him; and the fight becomes a referendum on status, power and attention. The politics may be consequential, but the language of the conflict is often the language of television — a medium Trump helped master, and one that continues to shape how he is challenged.