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Seth Meyers joked that Robert F Kennedy Jr might not be the best person to defend Donald Trump’s debate meltdown over eating pet dogs and cats – given his own very colorful history with dead animals.
On his show on Thursday night, the late-night host waded into the damage control efforts by Republicans and Trump allies following his showdown with Kamala Harris on Tuesday night.
RFK Jr was one of many trying to defend Trump’s performance.
Speaking on Fox News, he admitted Harris “clearly won the debate in terms of her delivery, her polish, her organization and her preparations” but claimed the Republican candidate won on his “governance.”
Meyers played the clip, before asking his audience: “Is RFK Jr really who the Trump campaign wants to elevate right now during a national conversation about eating unusual animals?”
“The guy was accused of eating a dog, said it was a goat, picked up a dead bear off the side of the road – which he later dumped in Central Park – because he wanted to eat it.”
RFK Jr has found himself embroiled in a firestorm over his wild comments about dead animals.
In 2023, RFK Jr texted a photo of himself and a woman posing with the barbecued remains of what appeared to be a dog, Vanity Fairreported. He told his friend, who was set to travel to Asia, that he may enjoy a restaurant in Korea that served dog on the menu, sparking questions as to whether RFK Jr had himself eaten dog.
When the report emerged, the 70-year-old insisted the grilled animal was not a dog but a goat he was enjoying on a trip to Chile.
“It’s me in a campfire in Patagonia on the Futaleufu River eating a goat, which is what we eat down there,” he told Fox News.
RFK Jr has also recently confessed to dumping the corpse of a bear cub in New York City's Central Park 10 years ago – a decade-long mystery that made headlines in 2014.
Claiming to have seen a car hit and kill the cub outside New York City, Kennedy clarified that he wanted to skin the cub and keep its meat in his refrigerator. He ultimately ended up dumping it in the Manhattan park.
“Can you imagine the inside of RFK Jr's fridge?” the Late Night with Seth Meyers joked.
“Where does he keep the bear meat? Next to the oat milk and the pickled pelican beaks?”
Meyers joked that even “bear carcass collector and brain worm jamboree RFK Jr” had to admit Harris had a much better debate than he did, but are just “hoping no one saw it.”
If the bear cub and barbecued dog sagas weren't enough, RFK Jr’s daughter also claimed in a now resurfaced 2012 interview with Town and Country that her dad once beheaded a dead whale using a chainsaw and strapped its head to the family's minivan for a five-hour drive – causing his children to put plastic bags over their heads to protect themselves from the “whale juice” pouring into the windows.
Meyers’s takedown of RFK Jr – who was running as an independent presidential candidate before suspending his campaign and endorsing Trump – comes as many Republicans admitted Trump’s debate performance was a “disaster.”
Some, meanwhile, tried to push a narrative that his lie-filled appearance went well.
Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy compared the debate to a wedding, telling CNBC's Squawk Box on Wednesday: “It didn’t go exactly as you wanted, but no one else really knows it.”
When the host responded, “I think other people noticed,” McCarthy said: “Yeah but Trump controlled himself more than normal.”
Meyers seized on this, saying with wide eyes: “Your argument is, 'that was better than normal'?”
“No, we definitely noticed,” he added. “We all saw it. Did Republicans think it was only on C-SPAN and get confused?”
“Well probably only a few people saw it right,” he said mockingly. “Oh what's that? It was also on ABC? Alright well that's just one major network. And NBC? And CBS? And MSNBC? And CNN? And Fox? Oh no no who else was carrying this debate? Lifetime? QVC? The Debate Fails Youtube channel?”
He added: “Even Nickelodeon had a debate feed where every time Trump screamed about eating dogs, he got slimed.”
The ABC News debate, the first between the two presidential candidates, brought in an estimated 67 million viewers on Tuesday night.
It now looks set to be the only one between Harris and Trump after Trump declared “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE” in a Thursday Truth Social rant.
