Late-night hosts mocked Donald Trump’s rebranding of AI as “super intelligence” and an embarrassing congressional hearing for Senate Republicans.
Jimmy Kimmel
Jimmy Kimmel used his Wednesday show, live from Brooklyn, to address news of a meeting between Donald Trump and the CEOs of major AI companies, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, to broker a deal on so-called “super intelligence”.
“Some of them have actually asked the government, please, help regulate us, put up guardrails so we don’t end up exterminating human life,” the host explained. “But Trump doesn’t want that. He wants the AI companies to self-police.
“Like remember how in the Terminator movies, the Terminators stopped when they asked him politely to stop terminating? That’s what he wants,” he said. “This is like asking your kids to self-police their Halloween candy. It doesn’t work.
“And nobody is better at managing their impulse control than these tech billionaires,” he continued. “You leave them alone for one weekend, they come back with the ugliest truck you’ve ever seen.
“This tells you all you need to know,” he added before pulling up a photo of Trump’s “White House Accord on Super Intelligence”, signed by, as written, the “president of the Unites States”.
“Could there ever be a better metaphor for this presidency than misspelling ‘United States’ on a document about super intelligence?” Kimmel mused. “There’s nothing these people can’t screw up.”
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers checked in on the US Senate, where ailing former majority leader Mitch McConnell finally returned to work after a prolonged hospitalization. Meyers examined footage of a mute and dazed-looking McConnell headed to the Senate and concluded: “That does not look like a man who should be going back to work at the Senate. That looks like grandpa on his way to the home.
“That’s the expression on your face when they’re driving you to the Soylent Green factory for processing,” he quipped.
“So there have been some less than flattering moments in the recent history of the US Senate,” he continued, “but I’ve never seen something quite as pathetic as what happened on Tuesday, when Missouri senator Eric Schmitt questioned Jack Smith,” the former special counsel who led multiple investigations into Trump after his first term as president.
“As you might recall, Trump has been obsessed with Jack Smith for years,” Meyers noted, with the president frequently calling him “deranged” and “a Trump hater”.
Meyers contrasted the many negative things Trump has said about Smith with his praise this week for the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un. “He’s happens to be a friend of mine,” said Trump. “He likes Trump, doesn’t like a lot of other people. I’m about the only person he likes in the world, and I like him.”
“He probably likes you because when you’re together, it’s the only time he’s not the craziest motherfucker in the room,” Meyers retorted. “It’s not a good thing if you’re the only person a bad person likes! Replace Kim Jong-un with any other villain and you’ll hear how bad it sounds – ‘You know, people don’t like when I say this, but Pennywise and I get along very well.’”
But back to Schmitt, who tried to prove that Smith was, somehow, tied to a conspiracy involving elections in Georgia, with the key piece of evidence being Smith’s alleged attendance at an Atlanta Hawks NBA game in 2024. “This is very hard to follow,” said Meyers. “It seems as though he’s trying to get Smith to admit that he attended a basketball game, which means … I’m not quite sure what? He’s talking like it’s a smoking gun, when at best it’s a banana with a cigarette taped to it?”
But it turns out that Schmitt’s would-be slam dunk evidence of text messages about a “hawks game” in fact confused the “Hawks”, the Atlanta team, with the “Hawkeyes”, the University of Iowa college basketball team that Smith did watch play in 2024.
“This was a pathetic display, but you guys don’t actually care about that,” said Meyers, addressing congressional Republicans. “All you care about is generating fever swamp content for your rightwing media boosters, even if it means humiliating yourself.”
