Late-night hosts reacted to Mitch McConnell’s return to the Senate after a months-long absence and the escalating costs of Donald Trump’s never-ending war with Iran.
Jimmy Kimmel
On Thursday evening, Jimmy Kimmel offered a less than stellar review for Mitch McConnell’s long-awaited return to the Senate this week after a prolonged hospitalization. Appearing before reporters this week, the 84-year-old former majority leader neither spoke nor seemed to have much idea what was happening; during a vote this week on the latest farm bill, he was told to say “aye” when called.
“This poor guy, he seems to have no idea where he is, what he’s doing,” Kimmel said. “I’m not even sure if he knows who he is at this point. They’re just wheeling him around like a statue in a wax museum.”
The host then played a clip of the Kentucky senator appearing mute, frozen and dazed as a reporter asked him, “Anything fun this weekend?”
“Anything fun this weekend?!” Kimmel laughed. “And this is one of the people we’re relying on to help navigate AI,” which has been constantly in the news this week after executives from the Silicon Valley’s top companies called for more regulation of their own technology.
Prominent figures such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei “have been sounding the alarm about this technology they have created”, Kimmel explained. “It’s like when the dinosaurs took over Jurassic Park.”
One Anthropic executive warned there’s about a 10% chance that AI could end all human life, “but don’t worry, because President Trump has assured us that this threat to our existence is nothing more than a hoax”, Kimmel laughed. “He says ‘the robots will not be taking over the world’, which is exactly what the president says at the beginning of the movie where the robots take over the world.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, senior administration officials have gathered almost daily for months to try to sway Trump to release more guidelines on AI safety. “They’re calling it ‘Operation: Take Away Grandpa’s iPad’,” Kimmel joked. “Almost every day they get together to talk about AI and develop plans for how to keep us safe, which they then bring to the president, who then tells them about his uncle who worked at MIT, eats his lunch and falls asleep, and that’s frustrating.”
But Kimmel had a proposal: “If you want him to take the threat of AI seriously, it’s real simple – tell him ChatGPT is about to release the Trump-Epstein files. I’ll bet $100 he’ll get Pandora’s stuff right back in that box.”
The Daily Show
And on The Daily Show, Michael Kosta checked in on the latest with Trump’s war with Iran. “When Trump launched this war back in March, he promised us it would take just a few weeks and that it would cost us nothing,” he noted. “And that promise went just as perfectly as all his other promises.”
According to a recent congressional budget office estimate, the war has cost American taxpayers an extra $38bn, with gas and diesel prices still on the rise. “And the cost is even more when you consider all the military bases we have to repair, all the equipment we have to fix, all the Iran war championship T-shirt merch we had to throw away,” Kosta joked. “So I’m just a little confused. Donald Trump has assured many times that we’ve already won the war, so why are gas prices still going up?”
That would be, in part, due to new Iranian strikes in the strait of Hormuz, which has been contested now for months. “How is this still happening?!” Kosta wondered. “We’re the United States – we almost beat the Taliban! I know we can handle one strait … ”
Except as of this week, in a dramatic escalation in the war, Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen threatened to take control the Bab al-Mandab strait, another crucial route for Saudi oil and global trade. “Wait, there’s a second strait now? This war is like a telenovela,” Kosta joked.
“I’m starting to think it’s bad that our entire economy is built on extracting oil from incredibly narrow waterways in the world’s most volatile region,” he deadpanned.
