Jimmy Kimmel
Jimmy Kimmel commented on Meta’s reinstatement of Donald Trump to Facebook and Instagram, with new “guardrails” in place to deter repeat offenses.
“Oh, those will work,” he deadpanned. “I’m sure this time he’ll be very well-behaved.
“Ever since he commanded an army of dim-witted goons to overthrow the government, he’s shown a lot of restraint. He’s almost a zen master now.”
Kimmel then turned to a batch of classified documents found at the Indiana residence of Mike Pence, which is “really throwing Republicans for a loop. They’re running around in circles trying to claim that what Biden did is worse than what Mike Pence did.”
Senator Ted Cruz, for example, called for the FBI to search Biden and his son Hunter’s homes; as for Pence, he said the story is “still early … he’s a good friend, he’s a good man. He’s explained where these came from. That was a mistake, but there’s no reason to think it was anything but inadvertent.”
“Right, even though they’re exactly the same thing, they’re not the same thing,” Kimmel translated.
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers braced for potential criminal charges against Trump and associates such as Rudy Giuliani for their role in trying to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.
“My sympathies to the grand jury members who had to sit there and listen to Rudy Giuliani for six hours,” Meyers said, referring to the former New York mayor’s deposition. “And that probably feels like 12 hours to Rudy, because as we discovered during a recent disciplinary hearing conducted via Zoom, he sometimes wears two watches by accident.
“If I’m Rudy’s attorney, that’s my entire defense,” Meyers added. “I’ll just let the prosecution go on for weeks on end, building a case that my client committed conspiracy. When it’s my turn, I’d stand up, face the jury and say ‘he didn’t know he had two watches on. And the defense rests.’”
The district attorney in Georgia’s Fulton county, Fani Willis, said a decision on criminal charges based on the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election was imminent.
Still, “I gave up a long time ago predicting whether Trump will ever be indicted because he seems to wriggle his way out of every jam he’s ever been in,” Meyers cautioned, “which is surprising given that he has the flexibility of a Mr Potato Head who got dropped in the toilet.”
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert remarked on Joe Biden’s decision to send 30 M1 Abrams tanks to help Ukraine in its war against Russia. “The Abrams is a gamechanger for this war in Ukraine,” he explained – each tank weighs 70 tons and can travel up to 42mph, “plus it comes with a free month of Sirius XM”.
The US had been reluctant to send the tanks, but did so in coordination with Germany, which agreed to send some of its Leopard tanks to Ukraine, “making this the first time anyone in Europe has said ‘good news! The German tanks are rolling in,’” Colbert quipped.
Colbert also provided new information on Pence’s classified documents, some boxes of which came through the White House and did not go through the same process the rest of Pence’s documents did. “Mike Pence, have you learned nothing from those announcements at the airport? Never carry a package for someone else!” Colbert exclaimed.
Surprisingly, Trump came to Pence’s defense. On Truth Social, he called his former vice-president an “innocent man” who “never did anything knowingly dishonest in his life”.
“Adding: ‘which is why I tried to have him killed,’” Colbert joked.
The Daily Show
Ukraine is fighting for their lives, and American tanks are going to take a year to get there? @iamwandasykes pic.twitter.com/xn48N4ft9E
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) January 26, 2023
And on the Daily Show, guest host Wanda Sykes also discussed the US tanks gifted to Ukraine, which probably won’t arrive for a year. “A year? Oh, come on, US,” she said. “Ukraine is fighting for its life, and America is like, ‘all right, the delivery window is from June till December. Make sure you’re home!’
“The reason it took so long to send these tanks is that Germany didn’t want to send tanks alone,” she explained. “They wanted another country to send tanks with them. Because as you know, it’s not a great look when it’s just German tanks rolling across Europe. Kinda makes people nervous.”
Sykes proposed that the tanks should have come from Sweden, to both Russia and Ukraine – “and then Sweden can do that thing you do where you send the tanks in parts with the diagram for assembling them,” like Ikea instructions.
“See, that would bring the countries together,” she concluded, “because no one can assemble that shit on their own.”
