Late-night hosts talked Donald Trump’s cabinet of billionaire donors and the House ethics committee stalemate over an investigation into Matt Gaetz.
Seth Meyers
On Wednesday’s Late Night, Seth Meyers offered a dire pronouncement on the state of American politics. “Our political system is dominated by billionaires. Both sides are captive to wealthy interests,” he said. “It should be noted that Kamala Harris had plenty of billionaires’ support of her own. But wealthy elites, including the richest man alive, played an especially unprecedented role in getting Trump elected. And he’s repaying them by putting them straight into his government.”
Trump has already nominated numerous billionaires into his cabinet, including transition adviser and billionaire donor Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary; Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the new “Department of Government Efficiency”; and Linda McMahon will be secretary of education. “What does a former head of a wrestling league know about education?” Meyers wondered. “Oh no, are teachers gonna open class now making sweaty threats into a microphone?
“So billionaires are effectively running the government now, and even the cabinet picks who aren’t billionaires themselves have billionaires backing them,” he explained. On Tuesday, Musk took to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter that he now owns, to support Trump’s embattled pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz. He wrote: “Matt Gaetz has 3 critical assets that are needed for the AG role: a big brain, a spine of steel and an axe to grind.”
“He’s got a big brain, he’s got a spine of steel and his eyes will be wide open because he can’t close them after all the Botox,” Meyers joked, referring to the Florida congressman’s apparent plastic surgery.
“Also, if you’re the nation’s top law enforcement officer, you’re not supposed to have an axe to grind,” he added. “You wouldn’t go to a doctor whose wife left him for you.
“Musk and the other billionaires want to use government as a tool to crush their enemies, and they want to hollow out regulatory agencies because those agencies are the only constraints on their power,” he concluded.
Jimmy Kimmel
In Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel lamented how the House ethics committee reached an impasse on whether to release the report investigating Gaetz’s alleged sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, special favors to associates and obstruction of justice. “Basically, all the same stuff that won Trump the election this time,” Kimmel quipped.
According to a report, the committee has records of 27 Venmo payments by Gaetz to two women for sex, totaling over $10,000. “If you have to worry about deleting your browser history and your Venmo transaction history every night, you probably shouldn’t be attorney general of the United States,” Kimmel mused.
“Every Republican on the House committee, every member of the ‘law and order’, ‘family values’ party, voted against releasing their findings,” he added. “Just like you do with any ethics report that completely exonerates someone.”
Releasing the report would require “one Republican – only one – to vote with the Democratic members of the committee,” said Kimmel. “In a party full of Minions, we have to hope that one of them is a Stuart,” he continued, referring to the Despicable Me character.
Trump is reportedly optimistic about Gaetz’s beleaguered nomination prospects. “But if Gaetz wants enough votes to get confirmed in the Senate, he’s got a lot of work to do,” said Kimmel. “Not on his face – he’s already done too much on that. It looks like his forehead got Zamboni-ed or something. Maybe instead of attorney general, he could be our plastic surgeon general?”
Stephen Colbert
And on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert also looked into the House stalemate over how to handle the Gaetz investigation. The House ethics committee includes equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, so going into the vote over whether to release the report, “all the ethics committee needed was one Republican with ethics”, Colbert quipped.
In the end, all of the Republicans voted to protect Gaetz. “So the vote went along strict party lines,” said Colbert. “And when Gaetz heard the words ‘party lines’, he showed up with a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill.
“What I want to know is: what the hell is it that they don’t want us to see?” he wondered. “Because the stuff we already know is so terrible that if Gaetz ever moves to a new neighborhood, he’s going to have to introduce himself door-to-door.”
Colbert recapped what we already know: that the lawyer representing two women testified that Gaetz paid more than $10,000 for sex, and that one saw him having sex with a 17-year-old, below the age of consent in Florida. The women also provided investigators with numerous photos of their time with Gaetz.
In other news, “it’s a day that ends in a Y, so that means Donald Trump has made yet another cabinet pick that makes you go, ‘why?’” said Colbert. As of Wednesday, Trump’s new nominee for secretary of education is the former WWE CEO Linda McMahon.
McMahon has no teaching background, “but you know what they say,” said Colbert. “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, get a job in the Trump administration.”
