Late-night hosts touched on Fyre Festival 2, Elon Musk’s government-wide email and Donald Trump going so off the rails on Russia that Fox News tries to rein him in.
Jimmy Kimmel
Tuesday brought news that there will be a second Fyre Festival, the disastrous 2017 gathering that stranded hundreds of influencers and other aspiring millennial types in the Bahamas. “You know what they say: if at first you strand hundreds of people on an island with no food or water, try, try again,” joked Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday evening.
According to the disgraced and now reinstated founder, Billy McFarland, tickets range from $1,400 to $1.1m, for an experience that will allegedly include yacht accommodations and access to performances, though none have been announced yet. McFarland, once described by Vanity Fair as “the poster boy of millennial scamming”, served four years in prison for wire fraud, as well as bank fraud and making false statements to law enforcement. “How he’s not part of the Trump administration already, I have no idea,” Kimmel laughed. “Because he’d fit right in.
“The whole country is a Fyre Festival right now,” he continued, “and Elon Musk is soaking the mattresses. It is so much worse than I think anyone imagined it might be.” Chaos continued to reign for civil servants served extremely mixed messages from the Trump administration, after Elon Musk sent an email to all government employees demanding they reply with “5 bullets of what you accomplished last week”.
“There are more than 3 million federal workers right now spinning in circles because they don’t know what to do,” said Kimmel. “And today our celebrity president made his plan perfectly clear.”
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said responding to the email was “somewhat voluntary but it’s also if you don’t answer, I guess you get fired. What it is is, do people exist?”
“Now I understand: it’s somewhat voluntary but if you don’t respond, he guesses you get fired. Thanks for clearing that up,” Kimmel deadpanned. “I think it might be time to give the planet to the apes, because we’re finished.”
Musk, Kimmel noted, doesn’t even have the authority to fire workers. “He’s not an elected official, he wasn’t appointed, he wasn’t confirmed,” he explained. “Who knew you could fire people at a place you don’t even work? I might try it at Chipotle sometime, just to see what happens.”
Stephen Colbert
Five weeks into Trump’s second presidency, “it is clear that he is hellbent on dismantling our federal government and ending our 80-year long western alliance,” said Stephen Colbert on Tuesday’s Late Show. “But on the bright side, these people clearly don’t have a clue what the fuck they’re doing.”
Colbert also touched on Musk’s email demanding “5 bullets of what you accomplished last week”. Some government employees responded with very rude emails with fake vulgar accomplishments, with links to graphic sexual images or scatological content.
Government departments, meanwhile, did not have a unified response. Some told their employees to ignore the email, others didn’t advise. On Monday evening, the office of personnel management (OPM) told HR leaders that responding to Musk was “voluntary”.
“OK, there’s clear guidance: federal workers don’t have to respond. Except at the same time Trump was saying this,” said Colbert, cutting to a clip of the president assuring that if one didn’t respond, “you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired.”
“Semi-fired, or you’re fired. That’s a boss anyone would want to work for,” Colbert deadpanned. “So if that’s not semi-confusing enough, Elon totally unclarified it more” with a post on X, the site formerly known as Twitter that he owns, promising “another chance” for federal employees to respond. “Failure to respond a second time will result in termination,” he added.
“Sounds like someone wants to get more poop porn,” Colbert joked. “At this point, how is anybody supposed to know what to do with all this confusing information? Forget running the government, these clowns couldn’t get 10 bridesmaids to a paint ’n’ sip.”
The Daily Show
Trump has gone so far off the rails for Russia that even Fox News is trying to walk him back pic.twitter.com/GjsfRybBu4
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) February 26, 2025
And on The Daily Show, Desi Lydic checked in on Trump’s peace plan for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Donald Trump promised he could secure a peace deal within one day of taking office, which means he is now negative 34 days ahead of schedule. Good work, sir!” she joked.
Since taking office, Trump has taken a clear pro-Russia stance, blaming Ukraine for the invasion of their own country. “You should’ve never started it,” he said recently. “You could’ve made a deal.”
“That’s an interesting interpretation, in that it’s not what happened,” said Lydic. “In fact, it’s the exact opposite of what happened.”
Trump has strayed so far from reality that even Brian Kilmeade, “the Joey Tribbiani of Fox and Friends”, tried to push back in a recent conversation with Trump on air. “Don’t you think it’s Vladimir Putin that did the invasion unwarranted to try to take back land they had no right to … and now both sides want to talk, it seems, so we should just get to that point?” he said.
“This is how off the rails Trump is: his beloved Fox News is saying: ‘Mr President, you sound crazy, and I believe DEI causes tornadoes,’” Lydic joked. “And he’s right – not about DEI causing tornadoes, we all know trans people cause tornadoes – about this war. Under Donald Trump, America has fully taken Russia’s side, which means … I think we might be the bad guys.”
