Late-night hosts talked Taylor Swift making the Forbes billionaire list, Trump’s immigration rhetoric and transphobic vitriol at his rallies.
Seth Meyers
Seth Meyers looked at Donald Trump’s rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin over the weekend, in which the former president called migrants “animals”, among other anti-immigrant rhetoric. “Trump doesn’t want to fix immigration, he just wants to scare people, as evidenced by the way he torpedoed a bipartisan border compromise while his aides draw up plans for mass deportations and detention camps,” Meyers said on Late Night.
“There’s only one policy he seems absolutely clear on,” he continued. As Trump put it in Wisconsin: “When I win, you’re all getting tax cuts and you’re getting a brand new Trump economic boom, because that’s where we were headed.”
“Oh, we were headed for an economic boom when you left office?” Meyers scoffed. “He’s doing that thing again where he pretends the last year of his presidency didn’t happen, like a Bill Cosby biography that ends in 2014. I can’t believe I have to say this, but Covid happened and it was bad. The economy crashed and people were locked in their homes.
“Life was obviously demonstrably worse under Trump’s presidency, but he and his allies think they can just pretend that everything was fine,” Meyers added. “Sometimes they do it by conveniently changing the timeframe.” Case in point, as Trump said at his Wisconsin rally: “Three years ago, we were a great nation, and we will soon be a great nation again.”
“Yeah, if only we could have whoever was president three years ago,” Meyers laughed. “Three years ago was April 2021, right? Joe Biden was in the White House, and you were moping around your chintzy swamp castle filled with plastic surgeons and their third wives looking paler than the boxes of classified documents you kept stuffed in your bathroom.
“Trump knows he can’t say we were better off four years ago, so he tries to change it to three years ago, but the numbers don’t work,” he concluded. “He’s like a kid in remedial math who gets the answer wrong just so he can spell funny words on his calculator.”
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert looked at Forbes’ annual billionaires list, in which an editor called 2024 “an amazing year for rich people”.
“Another one? That makes 300,000 years in a row!” Colbert remarked. “Congrats, guys, I would use some of that money to buy a very strong door and a deep moat, because they will eventually come for you if you keep this shit up.”
Taylor Swift made her debut on the list this year, with an estimated net worth of $1.1bn. “Get ready for her new album about her on-again, off-again love affair with the tax code, the Tortured Accountants’ Department,” Colbert joked.
Forbes reported that there are more billionaires than ever this year, even though 32 billionaires died. “Because even for billionaires, the only things certain in life are death and … actually, just death,” Colbert said.
As for Trump, who called migrants “animals” and lied about the 2020 election results in Wisconsin this weekend, Colbert had plenty of ire. “Pretty bold to go to a state you lost and tell the crowd you actually won,” he said. “That’s like bumping into your ex and saying, ‘Amanda, hi, you look well, which of course I know because it came out that we’re still together. We’re still together … by a lot.’”
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel touched on yet another Trump lawsuit, this time as the plaintiff – the former president is suing the co-founders of Truth Social. “I guess he had some free time between the 75 other lawsuits he’s involved in,” Kimmel quipped.
“This is classic Trump, you know?” he added. “He stands to make billions of dollars from this deal – billions! – but it’s not enough. He has to have the other guy’s money too.”
In other Trump news, the former president was “pushing the red hat hysteria of the week” in Wisconsin – this time, whipping up anger over Trans Visibility Day, which happened to fall on the same date as Easter this year, for which Trump blamed Biden. “It’s been on the calendar since 2009 on March 31. It has nothing to do with the office of the president,” said Kimmel. “But don’t let the truth stop you, go on!”
Trump called the shared date “such total disrespect to Christians” and promised a “Christian visibility day” if re-elected president.
“Yes, finally a Christian holiday we can celebrate,” Kimmel deadpanned. “I love that Trump is the ‘Christian’ candidate. Not only does he not go to church, he didn’t even go to church on Easter Sunday.”
