Jimmy Kimmel
Late-night hosts took aim at Matt Gaetz on Thursday evening, as the Florida congressman became the target of heated criticism from fellow House Republicans.
One colleague, Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, even told CNN that “there’s a reason no one in the conference defended him, because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor, that all of us had walked away from” about the women he had slept with.
And Marc Short, the former chief of staff for the former vice-president Mike Pence, said Gaetz came to Washington DC not for the principles of fiscal conservatism, but for “the teenage interns on Capitol Hill”.
“Wow, they’re feeding on themselves,” said Jimmy Kimmel. “It’s like alien versus sexual predator.”
Kimmel then turned to Donald Trump, who didn’t attend his fraud trial in New York on Thursday, where he faces charges of deceiving banks, insurers and others by providing financial statements that greatly exaggerated his wealth. New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, is seeking $250m in penalties and a ban on Trump doing business in the state.
The former president reportedly got frustrated on Wednesday and left halfway through the day’s proceedings, “as if it was Don Jr’s 10th birthday party or something”, Kimmel quipped.
“Of course he left,” he continued. “Do we actually expect him to sit here and listen to testimony in court day after day? The man has an attention span of a baby goldfish swimming in a bowl full of Four Loko.”
Stephen Colbert
“The United States Congress continues to be a brimming bucket of garbage,” said Stephen Colbert on the Late Show. And “the guy everyone finds particularly punchable in all this”, Gaetz, is taking heat from his Republican colleagues.
“Everyone he works with thinks Gaetz is a sleaze,” Colbert continued, pointing to Mullin’s comments that Gaetz bragged about having sex with underage girls, though “this is obviously before he got married.”
“Oh, well that makes it better then,” Colbert deadpanned. “‘Yeah my friend Ted used to scam old ladies out of their savings and then release them confused into the woods – before he had kids, obviously.’
“So Matt Gaetz was running around the floor of the House showing his amateur porn to anybody he could find, to everybody who works with him,” he noted. “That makes him sound like the over-the-top-bad employee example they use in HR training videos.”
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers poked fun at Trump’s overinflation of Mar-a-Lago during his fraud trial in New York. At a press conference, the former president once again claimed that his Florida resort was worth $1.5bn; the judge in the case has declared the property worth closer to $18m.
“No one believes your chintzy Florida swamp hotel is worth more than the global box office for Barbie,” Meyers retorted. “This place? The hotel that looks like the shit castle you put in a goldfish bowl so he has something to look at while he eats?
“This thing looks like the first house you buy when you get drafted by the Miami Heat,” he added.
“So the current Republican frontrunner for president is facing four indictments and a fraud trial, probably going to get kicked off Zillow, and on top of that, they currently don’t even have a speaker of the House,” he continued.
Furthermore, “the GOP infighting has gotten so intense and so personal that Republicans are starting to make salacious allegations about each other on television.”
Meyers also quoted Mullin, who told CNN that Gaetz had bragged to his House colleagues about “the girls that he had slept with” and “how he would crush [erectile dysunction] medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night”.
“Not only does Matt Gaetz definitely look like the spokesman for an ED medicine-infused energy drink, his name even has a Z that you know is on the can,” Meyers laughed. As for Mullin’s claim of chasing the ED medicine with energy drinks – “that sounds like something Rudy Giuliani would do by accident,” Meyers joked.
