Jimmy Kimmel
Late-night hosts continued to suss out the frenzied responses to the Super Bowl matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers on 11 February, which will probably include Taylor Swift in the stands.
Because it couldn’t just be that, some “Maga nuts”, as Jimmy Kimmel put it, spread conspiracy theories about Swift at the game as an elaborate Democratic psy-op. “They learned the word op and they’re using it a lot,” he deadpanned.
According to the theory, Democrats fixed the NFL playoffs to get Travis Kelce and the Chiefs to the Super Bowl so that his girlfriend, Swift, could endorse Biden on a massive stage.
“Let me get this straight,” said Kimmel. “The same people who believe that Joe Biden has dementia and needs Kamala Harris to feed him butterscotch tapioca every night also believe that he has somehow planned and executed a diabolically brilliant scheme to fix the NFL playoffs so that the biggest pop star in the world can pop up on the jumbotron during the Super Bowl in between a Kia and a Tostitos commercial to hypnotize her 11-year-old fans into voting for Joe Biden. It makes total sense.
“These people think football is fake and wrestling is real,” he added.
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert turned his attention to another round of dysfunction in Congress over immigration at the southern border. “No matter what your views are on immigration, there’s no denying there’s been a border crisis for decades, and recently it’s gotten even more serious,” he explained. In December, border crossings through Mexico reached nearly 10,000 people a day, more than four times the average level in the 2010s.
“Who could blame migrants for wanting to come here for a better life?” he said. “I mean they know our motto, E Pluribus Unum, which translates as ‘we put cheese in the crust.’”
After ginning up fear around the surge, the GOP held Ukraine aid hostage over a proposal to build another border wall; Biden caved and agreed to a border deal spearheaded by the Republican senator James Lankford … and then the GOP backed out.
“That is so crazy! Republicans are the ones who insisted on a border deal above everything else, and now they’re backing out,” Colbert exclaimed. “Are they lawmakers, or are they five-year-olds at dinner time? ‘What do you mean you don’t want buttered noodles?! You cried all afternoon about how you wanted buttered noodles so I made buttered noodles, you can’t suddenly want Eggo waffled and to deport Guatemalans without due process?!’
“Why did Republicans do this? The same reason they do anything,” said Colbert: Donald Trump, who wants to campaign on immigration.
As a result, Lankford, whom Colbert nicknamed “bangs” for an unfortunate old photo, was censured by his own party for participating in bipartisan border negotiations. “He did what they asked, and then he got spanked for it,” he mused. “You can read all about it in the erotic thriller Fifty Shades of Bangs!”
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers touched on reports that the Trump campaign is focusing its fundraising efforts on recruiting mega-donors. “Yeah, I wonder why,” Meyers said, referring to the $83m Trump owes E Jean Carroll for defamation, as ordered by a New York jury last weekend. “Suddenly $50 just ain’t cutting it any more.”
Meanwhile, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand called on Biden to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level, “though I don’t think you’re going to get progressive action on marijuana from someone who definitely still calls it reefer”, Meyers quipped.
In the paperback version of his memoir, the former Trump national security adviser John Bolton called the former president “unfit” for office. “It’s never a good sign when a paperback book has the strongest spine in the party,” Meyers joked.
And Muslim and Palestinian students at Harvard University have filed a federal civil rights complaint claiming that the school failed to protect them from harassment. “Wow, things are so weird at Harvard right now that I talked to someone who went there and they didn’t even bring it up,” said Meyers.
