With the Trump administration growing increasingly authoritarian, Herald writer Rosemary Goring asks if America’s comedians are becoming the real voice of opposition.

Calming evening rituals, they say, are crucial for a good night’s sleep. Drink camomile tea; take a warm bath; turn off your devices an hour before lights out. Needless to say, I do none of these. In my household, the bed-time ritual, if it can be called that, consists of a 15-minute blast of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the American comedian’s late- night talk show on ABC, as found on YouTube.

We don’t watch the whole hour, just the opening segment, which is devoted to a seamless satirical monologue about what Donald Trump and his gauleiters have been getting up to. Given his tight time-frame, Kimmel highlights only the stand-out edicts, comments and actions. That still leaves an awful lot of ground to cover.

It’s not the stuff of sweet dreams, I know, but it leaves me with a warm glow all the same. As we come away reeling, yet again, from jaw-dropping footage and the latest deluded and alarming announcements from the White House, it is profoundly cheering to see someone publicly - bravely - standing up to the president. It almost allows you to hope that one day the American nightmare could end.

Kimmel mercilessly lambasts Trump for his vicious policies. Far more damagingly, however, he turns him into a figure of fun. With deadpan delivery, he turns the president into the butt of joke after joke. Trump absolutely hates that. In September last year, under pressure from the administration, ABC suspended Kimmel for several days for comments he made about the killing of........

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