Late-night hosts discussed Donald Trump’s fake brand of working-class populism and his attempt to take credit for low insulin pricing.
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers spoke about how the Republicans have long been a party of the elite, with oil tycoons and CEOs dominating and how Trump also “inherited a fortune and a famous name”.
But they have “tried to rebrand and started claiming that actually the Republicans are the party of the working class” he said before showing footage of Ted Cruz screaming about various blue-collar jobs that voters have.
“When he screams he sounds like a vuvuzela in a blender,” Meyers joked before saying the noise “changes the migration patterns of geese”.
Trump managed to put “$2tn into the pockets of the richest Americans” during his time as president with a string of tax cuts.
Meyers played footage of a Fox Business pundit supporting Bernie Sanders after he called for lower drug prices in the US. “Somewhere in Australia, Rupert Murdoch is angrily snapping a didgeridoo in half,” he said.
Trump has also taken credit for low insulin pricing despite having nothing to do with it. Meyers suggested that he probably doesn’t even know what it is or what it does. He said Trump might think it’s the “stuff that turned Wade Wilson into Deadpool”.
Despite his claims otherwise, Trump is “a country club billionaire like all the others” with rumours emerging that, if voted in, he wants to eliminate income tax and replace it with tariffs, something that has been called the “worst macro-economic proposal in US history”.
Meyer said that perhaps Trump “may not understand business” before running through a list of his failed businesses including his airline. “When those doors blew off the planes, they just left them off,” he joked.
Stephen Colbert
On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert saluted Juneteenth, a US national holiday to remember the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas found out they had been freed.
He said it was seen as a “day of rest and remembrance” when people can also “stand perfectly still”, playing viral footage of Biden’s strange stance at a Juneteenth celebration last week.
This week has seen a heatwave across much of the US, with a record 103 degrees in Maine. Colbert joked that Stephen King will now be writing “Misery 2: The Backs of My Knees Are So Sweaty”.
Studies have shown that increased heat can be bad for the brain, making it harder for many to find their words and leading to higher rates of aggression and violent crime. “Well that explains Florida,” he joked.
Trump’s latest rally was in Wisconsin where “his brain seem parboiled”. Among other strange moments, he made the “bizarre accusation” that Biden was using cocaine. “Joe Biden is not on the Peruvian marching powder but if he did want to dance with the white lady, he could raise a lot of campaign cash selling his own brand of joe-caine,” he said.
This week also saw the news of the Democratic Vermont legislator Jim Carroll finding out that his Republican colleague had been regularly drenching his tote bag in water. Colbert said it was a “political scandal that some are calling … Watergate”.
Jimmy Kimmel
On Jimmy Kimmel Live, the host also spoke about Juneteenth “or as it’s called on Fox news, Wednesday”.
While Biden made mention and paid tribute, Trump shared the same old “angry garbage” despite having claimed he has done more for Black Americans than almost anyone else in US history.
A new book, focused on The Apprentice, has released details of Trump’s strange behaviour, with the author claiming that he had trouble remembering who he was. Ramin Setoodeh said he interviewed Trump initially and then met him again months later for a follow-up yet they had to start from scratch and go through the same questions as he had no memory of it.
“I don’t know about that, it’s not like him to repeat himself,” Kimmel joked.
Trump also claimed that Joan Rivers voted for him in 2016 despite the fact that she died in 2014. “So he’s right, dead people are voting,” he joked.