Stephen Colbert
Late-night hosts dug into new leadership in the House, Trump’s civil fraud trial and the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, on Thursday evening. “It has been 24 hours since House Republicans reached into a bag of randos and pulled out a shiny new speaker of the House,” opened Stephen Colbert on the Late Show, as Republicans elected Mike Johnson of Louisiana.
“How many of you know a Mike Johnson?” Colbert asked his audience to a loud cheer. “Any of those Mike Johnsons would be a better speaker of the House.”
Johnson is known to be anti-gay, having once said: “Homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic … ”
“… if you’re doin’ it right,” Colbert joked.
In other news, a new Senate report found that the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas failed to fully repay a $267,000 loan for a luxury RV he received from a “longtime friend”.
“It was a loan that I would never have to pay,” Colbert sang. “So, shocking revelations of secret payments to a supreme court justice who coincidentally happens to be the most pro-gun justice in our lifetimes.”
Which brought Colbert to his final topic of the evening, the mass shooting that killed at least 18 people at a bowling alley and restaurant in Lewiston, Maine. The suspected shooter, an army reservist and firearms instructor, had been committed to a mental health facility for two weeks over this past summer, yet was still able to purchase guns.
“Now, we know the arguments,” said Colbert. “Some people are going to say this is a mental health issue. Others are going to say it’s a gun issue. But there’s no reason it can’t be both. For instance some people are going to look at this tragedy and say we don’t have enough guns in America. That alone proves that some of us are mentally ill.
“There’s no reason for this to be a partisan issue. Humans are dying. This is a human issue,” he added.
Johnson addressed the carnage on his first day as speaker with the usual Republican line of hope and prayers. “Why would you leave it there?” Colbert fumed. “Is that what you think produces hope? Just leaving it there and walking away from the problem? We’re already capable of hope and prayer ourselves. You’re capable of governing, theoretically. And I’m sorry if that sounds like too hard of a job for you.
“You know who’s really got a hard job now? The people in Lewiston, Maine. That is hard.”
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers compared the blustery public Donald Trump to Trump under oath – under penalty of perjury, he’s suddenly “much calmer, more restrained, you could even say sheepish”.
“It’s like watching the neighborhood Rottweiler who’s always terrorizing the mailman suddenly mope around in a cone,” he said of a deposition video of Trump from June 2016.
“That’s the one way you can still punish Trump: make him sit down in a courtroom and answer questions under oath with his tail between his legs,” Meyers added.
At his civil fraud trial in New York on Wednesday, the judge brought Trump on to the witness stand to reprimand him for violating a gag order that prevented him from attacking court staff. Trump claimed he was actually criticizing his former fixer Michael Cohen when he publicly criticized court staff; the judge didn’t believe him and fined him $10,000.
“And then like a pissy teenager, Trump made things even more dramatic by storming out of the courtroom less than an hour later,” Meyers explained. “Just to give you an idea of how defeated Trump was after all that, when he left the courtroom, he gave the press a one-sentence answer and walked away.”
According to Trump, “the witness just admitted that we won the trial, and the judge should end this trial immediately”.
“Oof. That wasn’t even one of his good lies,” Meyers noted. “You know there are transcripts, right? That lady isn’t writing in her diary.”
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel opened with a new UCLA study that found that almost half of gen Z want less focus on sex in film and TV, and more of a focus on platonic relationships. “I’ve never felt more out of touch with a generation,” said Kimmel. “I mean, I try not to be the old guy complaining about kids these days, but sometimes I feel like I have to.
“Isn’t this supposed to be the live-and-let-live generation?” he continued. “I thought this was the whole point – don’t you know how hard we had it? Having to steal Playboys from our uncles and squinting at hours and hours of scrambled porn on cable TV? We earned these sex scenes!
“If you don’t want to see them, don’t watch them,” he concluded. “Go watch Planet Earth or your creepo ASMR videos or whatever the hell you watch. But for the love of God and Salma Hayek, stay the hell out of our naked stuff!”
