Seth Meyers
A day removed from one of the most effective January 6 committee hearings yet, Seth Meyers processed former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s shocking testimony. Hutchinson told the committee that Trump knew his mob was armed, that his staff planned to storm the Capitol, and that Trump tried to snatch a steering wheel from a Secret Service agent when they refused to take him there.
Hutchinson’s testimony was so stunning, said Meyers, that even Fox News “tried to summarize what happened, and when they were done, they just sort of sat there in awkward silence trying to figure out whose turn it was to talk”.
The moment was “like when you get in the car with your parents after they took you to a movie that had way more nudity than they were expecting,” the Late Night host said.
“So the plan all along was to have Trump join the mob down at the Capitol, which suffice it to say, would’ve been horrifying and impossible to contain,” he continued. “And Trump’s cronies, including Mark Meadows, knew that things could get ugly, to say the least. And Meadows, in particular, didn’t really seem to care.”
Hutchinson recalled that days before January 6, she asked Meadows, the White House chief of staff and her boss, about the plan; Meadows didn’t look up from his phone and replied, “there’s a lot going on, Cass. I don’t know, things might get real, real bad on January 6.”
“He reacted to plans for a coup like an exhausted dad who was just told his kids are playing with a bobcat they found in the woods,” Meyers remarked.
“So on the one hand, as an unprecedented constitutional crisis was unfolding, there were people like Hutchinson who were at least paying attention and asking questions,” he added. “And then on the other hand, there were guys like Mark Meadows, who was just totally zonked and pretending nothing was happening. Dude was just scrolling on his phone, ignoring pleas for help like a lifeguard at a swimming pool who has one guess left in Wordle.
“This hearing really was shocking, and I genuinely did not think I had the capacity to be shocked any more,” he continued. “Even Fox News seemed dazed and paralyzed by how devastating it was.
“At this point, we don’t need any more evidence. We need the justice department to act on it.”
Stephen Colbert
On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert also reacted to Hutchinson’s testimony, which was “such a game-changer, even Fox News didn’t know how to spin it”.
Colbert cued up a clip of post-hearing analysis from the Fox anchor Brett Baier, who said: “the testimony in and of itself is really, really powerful,” to silence from the other two Fox anchors. (A Fox News spokesperson explained it was a missed cue between anchors in separate studios in New York and DC on Tuesday.)
“That’s quite the pause,” Colbert noted. “That explains Fox News’s slogan: ‘Fair and … indeed yes, we are still here.’”
Eventually, co-anchor Sandra Smith said: “To your point, I wonder for the country watching this in this moment, how much this changes what people believed or did not believe.”
“That wasn’t his point at all, Sandra,” Colbert noted. “I believe his point was ‘very powerful testimony’. Who cares if it changes what viewers believe? Your job is to report the news, not speculate how your audience is going to react!”
In other bad news for Trump, the House committee vice-chair Liz Cheney closed the hearing by raising concerns of possible witness-tampering by an “unknown person”.
“Who could it be?” Colbert said, breaking out his Trump impression. “How dumb do you have to be to do crimes while being investigated for other crimes?”
Trevor Noah
The Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade has turned period tracking apps into pocket-sized snitches. pic.twitter.com/bGFhbzeuQv
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) June 30, 2022
And on The Daily Show, Trevor Noah examined the chilling fallout from the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade last week. “Ever since the supreme court decided that having a child is a sacred choice between a woman and her state legislature, abortion laws have been chaos,” he said. Some states have banned abortions, others have protected the right the procedure, and others have banned it only to have their courts overturn those bans until they reban it.
“So right now, women’s reproductive rights are as unpredictable as the McRib – it’s here, it’s gone, it’s here, it’s gone, it’s back again!” Noah explained.
In order to enforce bans in certain states, aggressive prosecutors could use data from period tracking apps or search history to prove that women have sought an abortion. “Which, first of all, is a very unhealthy practice in a relationship,” Noah said. “You don’t search through anyone’s phone, OK? It destroys trust. Don’t do it. And also, what a shit world for women to be living in.
“You need to use your phone for everything, especially period tracking or where you’re going to find an abortion clinic,” he continued. “Like how are you going to search for abortion pills without Google? Are you just going to write a question on a piece of paper, throw it out the window and hope for the best?
“That’s where we are in America right now: women taking care of their own health have to cover their tracks online like they’re planning a heist,” he concluded. “They have to disable location services, they have to talk to each other through encrypted apps. They have to kill the Duolingo owl before it snitches on them in English and Italian.”
