Late-night hosts discuss Donald Trump’s weekend of weird statements, JD Vance’s negative favorability rating and the myth of the “undecided voter”.
Seth Meyers
With just over a month to go until election day, Donald Trump is hitting the campaign trail, with rallies that are “becoming even more meandering and incoherent than they were before”, said Seth Meyers on Monday night.
The Late Night host recapped just a few of Trump’s extremely weird comments from the weekend, including: saying flies buzzing around his head were doing so for “suspicious” reasons, bragging that his beach body is better than Biden’s, and advocating for a Purge-style crackdown on shoplifting.
“I like when Trump plays tough – this guy wants to unleash the Purge on the country, but if he sees a fly buzz by, he loses his shit,” Meyers laughed.
“Trump only knows how to entertain his audience or frighten them, and he’s failing at the former,” Meyers added. “In fact, he’s so desperate that he’s now mumbling unintelligibly about how migrants are so strong there are no actors who could play them in movies, or something?
“Even his audience seems completely baffled” by this rant, which is simply too long and too meandering to reprint in full, but involved the words “no muscle content. We need a little muscle!”
Which made Meyers wonder: “This guy’s mind is like fully gone, right?”
Jon Stewart
On The Daily Show, the guest host Jon Stewart pretended to be an undecided voter still weighing the qualities of Trump and Kamala Harris. “It’s basically me and six people who were kicked in the head by very powerful horses,” he joked.
Stewart skewered critiques that Harris doesn’t have enough substance on “the issues”, when Trump spends his campaign speeches ranting about Hannibal Lecter and cannot articulate a single clear policy position. “So clearly what people like about Donald Trump is not his clear, specific policies as they demand from Kamala Harris,” he said. “But hey, I’m still open. I’m an undecided voter. You know, because the horse kick in the head. Let’s hear some of Trump’s passionate supporters explain what they see as his strengths.”
Stewart cut to a montage of Trump supporters testifying to his “characteristics”, such as being a “best friend” to American workers.
“The qualities and policies that people profess to be what they admire and love about former President Trump don’t seem to be an accurate reflection of said former president,” Stewart noted. “It’s as though they’ve created a fictional character, a Bizarro-Trump, whose accomplishments and character bear little resemblance to the self-aggrandizing, perpetual victim guy he continues to tell you explicitly that he is.
“This fictional Trump who is portrayed as much better than he actually is, is running to be president of a country he paints as much worse than it actually is,” he concluded. “But I gotta tell you, whatever country that is, where families are routinely murdered several times while making breakfast, could really use actual Donald Trump. The rest of us, not so much.”
Jimmy Kimmel
In Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel also mocked Trump’s incoherent rhetoric. “You know how he’s been calling on Democrats to dial down the rhetoric? I guess that only applies to them,” he said. At a rally in Wisconsin, Trump called both Biden and Harris “mentally impaired”.
“She was born that way,” he added of Harris. “Only a mentally disabled person could’ve allowed this to happen to our country.”
“What a lovely individual he is,” Kimmel deadpanned. “You’d think he’d be more sensitive, considering he has two sons who are mentally impaired, but I have to say – I think he’s flailing right now.
“He said so much crazy stuff this weekend,” Kimmel continued. “He said he wanted to close the Department of Education, he again claimed he won the debate ‘by a lot’, he threatened to prosecute Google because he believes they show bad search results about him. He said the people you see leaving his rallies, ‘it looks like they’re leaving but they’re not really leaving.’
“He complained that Fox News shouldn’t be allowed to show Kamala speaking,” Kimmel continued breathlessly. “He rambled more about Kamala not working at McDonalds. He referred to migrants as animals, he suggested that the way to end crime would be to have ‘one very violent day, one rough hour that would solve everything’ like the Purge.
“If anyone in your life had a weekend like this, you’d be concerned,” he concluded. “Like if your dad had a series of similar outbursts, you’d call your siblings to figure out what to do.”
Stephen Colbert
And on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert mocked Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, for his favorability rating of -11 points ahead of Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, “putting him right between unexplainable skin rash and watching Euphoria with your parents in the room”.
Harris’s running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, is reportedly less comfortable in a debate setting than on the campaign trail, and is anxious about letting Harris down. “Hey, buddy! We’re not going to win with that kind of attitude,” said Colbert, nodding to Walz’s past as a high school football coach. “Bring it in, coach! Sounds like you need one of your signature pre-game talks. Look, buddy, I want you to get out there, I want you to hunker down and find that extra gear, leave 110% of the pigskin on the fourth and down. Clear hearts, blue eyes, green clovers, purple horseshoes, go fish, yahtzee!”
Colbert also grimaced at Trump’s comments on shoplifting at a rally this weekend – “If you had one day, like one real tough nasty day … one really violent day, one rough hour, and I mean real rough, the world will get out and it will end immediately.”
“Did he just suggest the Purge for stealing from CVS?” Colbert wondered.
