Late-night hosts made their case for Kamala Harris and talked fallout for the Trump campaign after the racist joke about Puerto Rico at his Madison Square Garden rally.
Jimmy Kimmel
Jimmy Kimmel directed his 19-minute monologue on Tuesday at Republicans. “We are very divided,” he said, and not just because of Donald Trump. “Because of people like, if I’m being honest, me. I do a lot of mocking and belittling, and it isn’t always productive. Am I biased against Donald Trump? Yes. Do I think I have good reasons for being biased against him? Yes. And I think when you hear some of those reasons, you might agree with me, even just a little bit.”
Kimmel spoke to “open-minded” voters who, he assumed, were shown the monologue by a concerned loved one. “Most Americans, and you are probably one of them, don’t have time to watch his rallies and his speeches and all the interviews, because you have other things to do,” he explained. “But I don’t have other things to do. This is all I have to do. And because I don’t have other things to do, I have seen all or at least part of every interview, every speech, every all-caps social media post from this man in the past nine years.”
Kimmel said he wasn’t going to rehash the old stuff – the “grab them by the pussy” comment, etc – but just the “words that have come of his mouth” since he has been running for president.
He started with Obamacare, which Trump has, since 2016, said he would abolish without ever specifying his replacement plan. “We still haven’t seen a plan for healthcare!” he exclaimed. “If someone who works for you, let’s say it’s your barber, promises to present you with a plan for trimming your hair over and over again for nine years and never does, you’d probably fire that person.”
From healthcare to childcare to how to handle inflation, “he doesn’t even try to answer. He just tap dances.”
Kimmel also shot down Trump’s fearmongering about “sex changes” at elementary schools. “This is a lie. You have to know this. You do know this – this is not real,” he said. “The president should be focused on things that are actually things. There are so many difficult problems that need to be solved, and this guy keeps focusing on windmills.
“It’s kinda funny, these silly random rants of his,” he continued, “and they would be fine if he was hosting a podcast or selling knives at the farmer’s market, but he’s supposed to be leading us. People are listening to him. And the country is getting crazier because he makes it OK to be nuts.”
Calling Trump “the exact meeting point between Q-Anon and QVC”, he also mocked the former president for selling branded products, such as Trump Bibles. “How does this not bother anyone? How is this not embarrassing?
“He has no plan to lower grocery prices, or to make us safer, or to protect the border,” he added. “The only plan he has is to file lawsuits, legal challenges, settle scores and punish his enemies.
“Most elections are about policy. This one is not. This is about sanity, security and democracy,” he concluded. “I saw a shirt the other day, it said, ‘I support Trump because he pisses off the people who piss me off.’”
Kimmel got it – “sometimes it feels like we don’t have a sense of humor any more,” he noted. “But is that really all we want for America? To piss each other off? I don’t want that.”
Stephen Colbert
“In just seven days, we will finally, probably still not know who won,” said Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, with less than a week until “Americans try to decide between an expanded child tax credit, and the 10,000-year reich of Hamburglar Himmler.”
Colbert focused on the fallout from Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, in which the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating pile of garbage”.
“Here’s a little pro tip: when running for president, try not to October surprise yourself,” said Colbert. “It’s rare to tell a joke so bad that it alters the course of human history. The last time that happened was in 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand said at an open mic, ‘Serbian assassins are so ugly, their portraits hang themselves! Haha that joke killed … me! Uh-oh, world war one is starting.’”
On Tuesday, Trump “stepped up like a man and took responsibility for absolutely nothing”. Speaking of Hinchcliffe, Trump claimed: “I don’t know him, someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is …”
As part of his damage control, Trump then posted a video of a Cuban band singing about their support for him. “OK, to be fair, he may not realize that those aren’t the same place,” Colbert laughed.
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers reported that Trump said during his Sunday rally, “there’s no place like Madison Square Garden.”
“He’s right. Very few NBA arenas could go over 50 years without seeing a championship,” Meyers joked, referring to the New York Knicks.
In an interview, JD Vance declined to call the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, an enemy and instead called him an “adversary”.
“Well, that makes sense. A lot of people have an adversarial relationship with their boss,” Meyers quipped.
At a Harris campaign event this past weekend in Pittsburgh, Biden said Elon Musk was an “illegal worker” when he first came to the US from South Africa (via Canada). “Oh, come on, that’s not fair. He was never a worker,” said Meyers.
And the embattled New York City mayor, Eric Adams, denied claims that Trump was a fascist, and argued that “we can all dial down the temperature”.
“Which serves as a reminder that no matter who wins on November 5, Mayor Adams is going to need a pardon,” Meyers joked.
