Jimmy Kimmel
Jimmy Kimmel acknowledged “the most controversial federal holiday of all of them, Columbus Day” on Monday. “Here’s how you know Columbus Day isn’t so hot any more – there’s no Google Doodle for it,” he joked.
Monday was also Indigenous Peoples’ Day, “which is what it should be, probably”, he said. “But we have to pick one or the other, right? This is like saying it’s Arbor Day and Chainsaw Day. It can’t be both.
“Columbus was by all accounts a cruel and terrible, self-serving person,” he noted, who had “one job: to get to India. He missed it by 9,000 miles, but rather than admit he was wrong and not in India, he just started calling everyone Indians, which is so willfully ignorant.
“If he were alive today, he could probably run the Republican party,” he joked. “If you’re being honest with yourself, Christopher Columbus is basically what would have happened if Donald Trump had been born in the 1400s and his dad gave him a boat.”
Kimmel then turned to the former president, who took his “build-a-wall-a-palooza” tour to Mesa, Arizona, over the weekend and tried to claim that it was normal for ex-presidents to take home classified documents.
“He just kept repeating it, and none of that would excuse intentionally stealing and leaving classified documents laying around your golf course,” Kimmel said of the top-secret documents seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago in August. “But it’s all a plan. The whole thing is him priming the pump to get people to riot when he inevitably goes to prison.”
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers also looked into Trump basically admitting that he knew it was illegal to take top-secret documents to Mar-a-Lago. “Any normal person in that situation might stay out of the spotlight, or at the very least, avoid talking about the case in public,” said Meyers of the investigation into whether Trump mishandled documents.
“But Trump, as we all know, is not normal,” he continued. “And during that rally in Arizona Trump, decided just essentially to confess.”
Trump said he had a “small number of boxes” in storage at Mar-a-Lago “guarded by Secret Service and my people and everybody. I mean, it’s safe,” and also claimed “it’s not a crime,” calling the documents “mine”.
“The key quote there is when he says it’s ‘mine’. That shows you it’s not a misunderstanding,” said Meyers. “He didn’t take the classified documents by accident; he took them on purpose because he thinks they belong to him.
“And when you’re proving a crime, criminal intent is key,” he added. “I know that because I watch a show called Law & Order: Criminal Intent – it’s right there in the title. There was never a Law & Order spinoff called Law & Order: Oops, My Bad.”
Trump also claimed without evidence that former president George HW Bush took “millions” of top-secret documents to a former bowling alley and former Chinese restaurant in Texas, where he “combined them”.
“And that is why, to this day, if you’re in Texas, you can stop by HW’s Wok and Bowl and Top-Secret Document Warehouse,” Meyers joked.
Stephen Colbert
And on the Late Show, Stephen Colbert checked in of rising tensions with Putin’s Russia, as Biden warned that we face the most serious prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. “That is scary. Joe better get those nuclear codes back from Mar-a-Lago,” Colbert joked.
Also troubling: the US Department of Health and Human Services recently spent $290m on a drug to treat radiation sickness, which they claimed was “coincidental” timing.
“Yeah, it sounds so coincidental,” Colbert deadpanned. “It’s like saying, ‘Yeah, a lot of beefy men in the neighborhood have disappeared with no trace. Anyways, who wants meat pies! I have a suspicious amount.’”
After years of “slowly descending into Maga madness”, Kanye West rejoined Twitter over the weekend with several antisemitic posts, including a death threat to Jewish people in general.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Colbert. “You’re thinking: Steve, Kanye’s been acting erratically for awhile. This vile act of antisemitism is something anyone with a brain could see coming. Which is why so many on the right chose not to see this coming.”
Over the weekend, the GOP House judiciary committee Twitter account posted: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”
Colbert whipped out a Jeopardy-esque buzzer. “What is: three people I would trap in a Porta-Potty and roll it downhill?”
