Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert caught up on a deluge of January 6 committee news following a week off from the Late Show with Covid. Starting with: the 2,319 text messages handed over to the committee by Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. “That’s a lot of messages,” Colbert said on Monday evening. “Luckily Meadows has T-Mobile’s Unlimited Talk and Treason plan.”
The messages included an exchange between Meadows and Sean Hannity, in which Meadows encouraged the Fox News host to “stress every vote matters”.
“Yes sir … on it,” Hannity responded.
“That is a shocking level of toadyism, even for a guy who looks like a bullfrog,” said Colbert. “But he’s just living up to the Fox News slogan: ‘We report. You decide what we should say, and by the way, your boot tastes delicious today, Mr President.”
On Friday, Hannity “tried to claim he wasn’t caught – he meant to have no ethics”, Colbert continued. According to Hannity, “I don’t claim to be a journalist. I claim to be a talkshow host … I make no apologies, I give my opinions straightforward. We even do culture, we do sports, I’m like the whole newspaper.”
“Yes, Sean Hannity is just like a newspaper – out of date, bad for the planet, only relevant to people over 70, and I’d love to see a puppy poop on him,” Colbert noted.
There were also messages from former Trump energy secretary Rick Perry claiming to have non-existent evidence of voter fraud. Perry denied sending the texts, though they were signed “Rick Perry” and included his phone number. “Why are these guys so bad at committing crimes?” Colbert wondered. “It’s like if the Zodiac Killer released a note that said ‘This is the Zodiac speaking. To unearth my identity solve the enclosed cipher … and return to John Evans, 1414 Hawthorne Lane. Good luck!’”
Trevor Noah
Trump can’t remember who he’s endorsing in the Ohio GOP primary. Is it JD Vance, Josh Mandel, or a little bit of both? pic.twitter.com/C576CH2P74
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 3, 2022
On The Daily Show, Trevor Noah checked in on the contentious Republican Senate primary in Ohio, led by the Yale Law graduate and famous author JD Vance. The venture capitalist “became famous for writing the book turned horrible movie Hillbilly Elegy, where he explained that white people become racist because they’re poor,” Noah explained. “Yeah, that’s why they say the N-word with a hard R, because they can’t afford a vowel.”
During the book’s promotional run in 2016, Vance was a vocal critic of Trump. He was a self-described “Never Trump guy”, called him “unfit for office” and “cultural heroin”, with policy proposals that “range from immoral to absurd”.
Not any more. Vance has embraced Trump during the campaign, releasing an ad in which he proclaims: “Trump fought back, and so have I.” His GOP rivals have similarly toadied up to the former president; competitor Josh Mandel’s slogan is “Pro-God. Pro-Gun. Pro-Trump.”
“Whether it’s JD Vance or Kevin McCarthy or countless other Republicans, the entire party right now is basically Mean Girls,” Noah said. “They all talk shit about Trump behind his back, but then to his face it’s all like, ‘Oh my God, Donald, you look so hot!’”
And “after months of competing to see who could stick their nose the furthest up Trump’s ass”, the former president endorsed his former critic. “Although clearly Trump doesn’t really care about these people as much as they care about him,” he noted, because Trump misnamed Vance as “JP, I mean JD Mandel” at a rally on Sunday.
“I feel bad for JD Vance, because now he’s going to have to change his name to JP JD Mandel,” Noah joked. “Because if you’re a Republican, Trump is never wrong. At the GOP Starbucks, whatever name Trump calls, that’s you.”
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers reacted to news that a judge ruled that Trump is still in contempt of court for refusing to comply with a subpoena as part of the New York attorney general’s investigation into his company. The judge rejected Trump’s affidavit that he couldn’t find the requested documents.
“It doesn’t surprise me at all that Trump says he can’t find the documents they want,” Meyers said. “I’m betting the Trump Organization didn’t have actual files. I doubt they even recorded any of their meetings. When you get a Google calendar invite from the Trump Organization, it just says ‘Subject: The Thing,’ ‘Location: The Place,’ ‘Attendees: The Guys.’”
“If you ask me, there’s a decent chance the reason he doesn’t have them is he flushed them down the toilet,” Meyers added. “This is the guy the Republican party is in lockstep behind.
“Just consider how humiliating it must be to grovel for the toilet weirdo’s endorsement, which Republicans across the country have been doing.” This includes Vance, who beat out rival Josh Mandel for Trump’s endorsement in the Ohio GOP Senate primary only for Trump to refer to him at a rally as “JD Mandel”.
“This is how much you have to forfeit your dignity to succeed in today’s Republican party,” Meyers noted. “You have to grovel and debase yourself to earn the endorsement of a guy who can’t even remember your name.”
