Stephen Colbert
The House select committee hearings on the events of 6 January last year commenced again, and “we’re all waiting to find out if the former president gets to go to the fantasy suite with Lady Justice,” Stephen Colbert quipped. “She’s blind, so he’s got a shot.
“So far my major feeling about these hearings, both Thursday and today, is one of enormous gratitude,” the Late Show host continued. “We know a lot of this stuff already, but watching them put it together reminds us that we’re not crazy. For the past 17 months, the former president and his spineless toadies have been gaslighting us, telling us that we did not see what we all saw: a coup. And it’s not like the guy was hiding it, ever.”
“He told everyone he was going to commit a crime, and then he went out and he crimed it,” Colbert said.
During the Monday hearing, Liz Cheney said Trump ignored advisers who confirmed the 2020 election was over and instead followed the advice of an “apparently inebriated” Rudy Giuliani to pursue non-existent claims of election fraud.
“That raises an interesting question: how many of the former president’s terrible ideas came from an inebriated Rudy Giuliani?” Colbert wondered. “Could it be … all of them?”
Trevor Noah
“According to the committee, Trump planned to overthrow the election because he knew that he had lost,” Trevor Noah explained on Monday’s Daily Show. “And the reason that we know he knew that he had lost is because now everyone around him is spilling the beans.”
Former attorney general Bill Barr, for example, called the fraud claims “bullshit” and “bogus and silly”, while daughter Ivanka Trump said she “accepted” Barr’s assessment.
“Trump’s inner circle was well aware that the election did not go their way, and they told Trump,” Noah noted. “Except for one person, who had the liquid courage to say that Trump did win.”
That would be the “apparently inebriated” Rudy Giuliani, who was “definitely intoxicated”, as former Trump adviser Jason Miller told the committee.
“I’m just curious how you even know when Rudy Giuliani is drunk,” Noah wondered. “Because when a normal person is drunk, they say crazy things, they yell, they sweat a lot. So how does that work with Rudy? Does it work in reverse? Like does he start talking normally, his hair dye sucks back into his hair?
“It actually says a lot about Trump that a whole team of sober advisers – his attorney general, his campaign manager, his daughter whom he wants to bang … they were all telling him ‘you lost this election, sir,’” Noah continued. “But then Trump was telling them, ‘yeah, yeah, whatever – drunk vampire, what do you think?
“When you think about it, it actually makes sense that Trump would listen to a drunk person,” he concluded, “because that’s the one time people probably sound like him.”
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers also took aim at Giuliani, a familiar target. “It turns out a significant portion of the hearing, bolstered by witness testimony, focused on former mayor Giuliani, an attorney to the president of the United States, being blitzed out of his fucking mind,” he said.
“It’s so funny to me how in all these depositions, Trump aides are all hemming and hawing, pausing and taking their time to use the most precise legal language possible because they’re under oath,” he added. “But then as soon as someone asks, ‘was anyone drunk at the White House?’ they all immediately buzz in like the over-eager uncle on Family Feud. ‘Rudy! It was Rudy!’
“In fact, if ‘who was drunk at the White House?’ was a question on Family Feud, the top five answers would all be the same: Rudy,” he joked.
Meyers also noted that the first primetime hearing last Thursday drew an estimated 20 million viewers, on par with such television events as Sunday Night Football and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. “I’m not surprised the hearing got Thanksgiving parade ratings, since so many of Trump’s inner circle look like they could be balloons,” Meyers quipped.
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel also debriefed the January 6 hearing. “It is so crazy to see so much evidence confirming that Donald Trump did all the things we saw him do on television every day for three months straight,” he said.
As for an “apparently inebriated” Rudy Giuliani – “which, by the way, is the title of Rudy’s autobiography”, Kimmel joked – the host wondered what could be the difference between drunk and sober Giuliani. “The way you can tell that Rudy is drunk is that his breath smells more like booze than cigars and cat turds for a change,” he joked.
“So Rudy was drunk. The big question is what’s Donald Trump’s excuse? He doesn’t even drink,” Kimmel explained. “There are really only two options here: either Donald Trump was lying and committed multiple crimes trying to strong-arm an election, or he’s off his freaking rocker. I guess it could be both.”
