Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert picked up on Monday where he left off last Thursday evening: anticipating Donald Trump’s arraignment on charges stemming from hush-money payments during the 2016 presidential campaign. “So what happens now?” he wondered. “What does he plead? When is the trial? What if he goes to jail? He could end up the head of a violent white supremacist gang, but in prison this time.”
Monday marked arraignment eve, as it was widely expected Trump would appear for booking on Tuesday at a Manhattan courthouse. “The courthouse, a big busy throng, awaiting the man with the mushroom-shaped dong – allegedly!” Colbert joked in faux-holiday rhyme.
The arraignment will reportedly include fingerprinting the former president, and “they won’t even have to use ink”, Colbert quipped. “I’m pretty sure there’s enough ketchup on there all the time.”
Meanwhile, numerous Republican commentators have tried to discredit the charges by warning, as Vivek Ramaswamy put it on Fox News, that “if they can do it to Trump, they can do it to you”.
“It’s true,” Colbert deadpanned. “If this indictment stands, then no one who has their fixer pay six figures in hush money to their porn star lover, then reimburses that fixer out of business expense accounts, then falsifies it as ‘legal fees’ and conspires with the publisher of the National Enquirer to catch and kill stories about his other extramarital affairs as part of another illegal violation of campaign finance laws, will be safe!
“You know the old saying,” he concluded. “First they came for the former president, and I said nothing because he is so fucking guilty.”
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers also celebrated the indictment of the former president, which includes 34 charges.
“Thirty-four counts! I mean, if you throw in the other cases that he’s dealing with – the coup attempt, and the classified documents he stole – by the time we get to the primaries next year, Trump will be facing like a thousand criminal charges,” Meyers said. “Which would be very funny, if we spent all this time waiting for one criminal charge and ended up getting a ton of them all at once.
“It’s like when you turn on a hose and nothing comes out and you realize you’ve been standing on it, and you take your foot off and you just get blasted in the face,” he added.
Meyers also blasted a strain of media commentary focusing on the unprecedented nature of Trump’s indictment; he’s the first US president to be criminally charged. Or, as one CNN writer put it: “There is nothing in American history that approaches the tumult of the charging and possible trial and conviction of a former president.”
“OK first of all, it’s not a former president. It’s this one,” Meyers responded. “You’ve got to stop talking about how a former president being arrested is this crazy and unprecedented act, without mentioning that the guy was crazy and unprecedented. Until now, we mostly elected career politicians, and then for some reason we flipped out and went for brain-damaged casino greeter. You don’t get to be surprised he turned out shady.”
The Daily Show
Trump already raised $5 million since the indictment dropped. Do you know how many cigarettes that'll get you in prison?! @roywoodjr pic.twitter.com/zoft8Qju0I
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) April 4, 2023
And on the Daily Show, guest host Roy Wood Jr also relished the Trump indictment news. “You know Trump gotta be mad,” he said. “He paid all that hush money, did nobody hush.
“But no affair has been less hushed than this one,” he added. “Everybody knows about this damn affair. There’s uncontacted tribes in the Amazon who know that Trump boned Stormy Daniels.”
Wood grinned as he replayed news coverage anticipating Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday in Manhattan, which would include fingerprinting and a DNA sample, with the Secret Service in attendance. “That’s right, Trump’s gotta provide a DNA sample. Which if you think about it, it’s kinda how he got in this mess in the first place,” Wood joked. “The upside with Trump’s DNA is now the NYPD can probably solve a bunch of cold cases from the 80s.
“Why are they arraigning him like he’s a normal person?” he wondered. “Trump ain’t a normal person. Normal people don’t bring the Secret Service to get arrested.”
Wood felt sorry for the Secret Service agents, he added facetiously, because “you get assigned to a former president, and you’re supposed to be going to baseball games, windsurfing. You get assigned to Trump, you’ve gotta go to Rikers! You’ve gotta take a shank for this man, you’ve gotta taste-test the toilet wine and make sure it ain’t poisoned.”
