Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert returned to The Late Show on Monday after two weeks away with a ruptured appendix, which he promised to discuss later in the evening. “I know no one wants to hear too much about a hunk of dead intestine filled with poison and bile, but unfortunately Donald Trump is in the news,” he quipped.
“Recently, people have been warning about Trump being a wannabe dictator, ’cause he wanna be,” he added. “His re-election campaign from the beginning has been all about retribution.”
And in widely circulated comments with Fox News’s Sean Hannity last week, Trump promised to not be a dictator if re-elected – except for the first day.
“Obviously, we know he’s kinda trolling here,” said Colbert. “But we also know he’s telling us exactly what he plans to do. And if he gets unlimited power he won’t be giving it up. People don’t go ‘and that’s the last time I’ll be trying crack’.”
Still, numerous congressional Republicans have downplayed Trump’s authoritarian promises. In a news interview, Mitt Romney compared him to a “human gumball machine” in which “a thought or a notion comes in and it comes out of his mouth”.
“What are you talking about?” Colbert responded. “Trump is not a gumball machine. Gumball machines give you the same thing every time: a gumball. With Trump you put in a penny one time, it’s a gumball; the next time, it’s a meatball – sometimes it’s Kevin McCarthy’s balls, you never know.”
Seth Meyers
In other Trump news, his former lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has been in court for a defamation lawsuit brought by Georgia election workers he falsely claimed tampered with votes. Giuliani reportedly attended a jury hearing this week with an unbuttoned belt after a delay in the court security line.
“Oh, brother. If you’re Rudy’s lawyer and he shows up to court late with his belt hanging at his waist, is that the moment you realize you’re fucked?” Meyers wondered. “I just can’t imagine any jury is going to see Rudy penguin-walking with his pants around his ankles like [Seinfeld’s] George Costanza and say, ‘You know what, let’s hear him out!’”
Like Colbert, Meyers also denounced numerous Republican lawmakers who dismissed Trump’s dictator comments as a joke.
“Let me just remind you guys of a thing we learned years ago: Trump is always joking until he’s not,” he said. When Trump says something crazy and it backfires, he can claim it was a joke, but if his base likes it, he goes with it. He’s a husband joking about a three-way with his wife.
“Even worse, some Republicans are still claiming now that Trump will learn his lesson and change his rhetoric,” he added, pointing to an interview over the weekend in which the former House speaker Kevin McCarthy claimed Trump would change his tone in office and “adapt when he gets all the facts”.
“You think Trump will adapt? Once he sees the facts?! He can’t even adapt to the weather. The guy can’t close an umbrella,” said Meyers. “Trump will only ever adapt when it’s in his immediate interest.”
Jimmy Kimmel
And at a New York Young Republicans dinner over the weekend, Trump bizarrely talked about a “shadow government of corrupt alliances” in the “deep state” which hides “under carpets and rugs”.
“Right, that’s not a Roomba, it’s George Soros!” laughed Jimmy Kimmel.
“You know, just because Melania hides from you under carpets and rugs doesn’t mean that other people do that,” he added.
Kimmel then turned his attention to the disgraced ex-congressman George Santos, who, since his expulsion from Congress for fraud, has found a somewhat lucrative second career on the app Cameo. The New York Republican claimed that he made more money in seven days on Cameo than during an entire year in Congress, “and part of that money came from me”, Kimmel said, noting that he paid to submit some video requests to play on the air last week.
Santos has since demanded that Kimmel pay a commercial rate of $20,000. “Can you imagine if I get sued by George Santos for fraud?” he mused. “Now how good would that be? It would be like a dream come true.”
