Seth Meyers
Late-night hosts recapped the testimony of Ivanka Trump during her father’s New York civil fraud trial on Wednesday, a scenario Trump was reportedly “desperate” to avoid. “I’m assuming because Ivanka is, in his eyes, the most competent and thus the most knowledgable member of the family,” Seth Meyers speculated on Late Night. “There’s no way Trump trusted his two bearded, oblong bozos” – Eric and Don Jr – with any real information, but Ivanka could get him in trouble.”
She could, for instance, explain why Trump, during his own testimony on Tuesday, presented a piece of paper from his jacket pocket that he claimed would clear his name.
“I’m honestly dying to know what that document was, because it was no doubt incredibly stupid,” said Meyers, imagining its contents: “Your honor, I have in my possession the fortune of a cookie, obtained last night at Mr Chang’s on 58th street.”
Nevertheless, new polling on the likely 2024 presidential matchup between Trump and Joe Biden shows Trump near-even with the current president in several battleground states, which baffled Meyers. “You’re telling me that Trump, the guy who stocked the bsupreme court with 80s movie villains with the explicit goal of overturning Roe v Wade, is leading the polls in Ohio, where voters just overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to protect abortion rights?” he said. “This shit makes so little sense, even Steve Kornacki’s big board last night said, ‘I give up.’
“One thing’s for sure: standing up for abortion rights and bodily autonomy wins elections,” he continued. “Voters are clearly furious about losing Roe and even in supposedly red states like Kentucky and Ohio, they’ve been turning out in large numbers to protect reproductive rights.”
“It was also evident in the way they were coping last night that Republicans are having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that their position on abortion is deeply unpopular with the majority of voters,” he added, pointing to a clip of Fox News host Sean Hannity trying to make sense of the election in Ohio, the seventh state to enshrine abortion rights by ballot measure since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last year.
According to Hannity, “Democrats are trying to scare women into thinking Republicans don’t want abortion legal under any circumstances.”
“Yeah, I wonder where voters could possibly have gotten the notion that Republicans want to outlaw abortion, aside from all the GOP-led states that have outlawed abortion, or the GOP politicians who say they want to outlaw abortion, or the new speaker of the House who sponsored a bill to outlaw abortion,” Meyers retorted.
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel opened with a look at the Republican debate, which featured five candidates who “look like they’re complaining to the manager at a Starbucks”.
The lineup – Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Ron DeSantis and Chris Christie – notably did not include frontrunner Donald Trump. “It’s a who’s who of who has no chance to beat Donald Trump,” Kimmel joked. But for these five Republicans, “the stakes were higher than lifts in a pair of Ron DeSantis’s boots.”
“It is ridiculous to have these debates without the frontrunner, the guy they’re trying to beat,” he added. “I mean, you know things have gone sideways when you’re watching something and you’re thinking god, I wish Donald Trump was there.”
Kimmel then turned to Ivanka Trump’s testimony in New York. “Only in the Trump family does take your daughter to work day mean she’s forced to testify in court,” he joked.
Like her brothers, Ivanka pleaded ignorance, frequently answering with “I don’t recall” – “which is a phrase she picked up from her father when Eric asked when his birthday was,” Kimmel quipped.
And in election news, Ohio became the 24th state to legalize cannabis for recreational use. “It’s about time,” said Kimmel. “The Wright brothers are from Ohio, Neil Armstrong is from Ohio – people from Ohio know how to get high.”
