Late-night hosts talked Maga world’s spin on Hunter Biden’s conviction, Pope Francis’s homophobic comments and Donald Trump’s possible probation violations.
Seth Meyers
Seth Meyers dove into far-right conspiracies about the Biden family on Wednesday evening, explaining the gist of the false argument as “Joe Biden isn’t the kindly grandpa he pretends to be. He’s actually an evil puppet master pulling all the strings and carrying out his fiendish plan to crush his enemies and turn America into a woke dictatorship, starting with the Trump guilty verdict.
“This is the contradiction of how the right wants us to see Biden,” he continued. “He’s either a puppet master pulling all the strings, or he’s a puppet whose puppeteer has taken the day off.
“And now, Biden has pulled off his greatest, perhaps most conniving feat yet,” Meyers deadpanned, referring to his son Hunter Biden’s conviction on three felony charges for falsifying an application for a gun.
“You would think this news would definitively disprove the GOP’s ludicrous notion that Joe Biden is somehow pulling the strings to target his political opponents, since he can’t even get the justice department to lay off his own son,” Meyers noted. “But that’s not how the GOP’s reality distortion field works. Their conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable. They can’t be disproven. When one lie is debunked, a bigger, crazier lie takes its place.” He played a series of clips in which Fox News hosts and other Republican figures claimed Hunter Biden’s conviction was actually a “distraction” or “red herring” from the “real crimes” of the “Biden crime family”.
“You guys only think Joe Biden would frame his own son because that’s definitely something Trump would do,” Meyers laughed. “He probably only named him Don Jr so he could pin crimes on him.
“Hunter Biden’s guilty verdict disproved their conspiracy theory,” he concluded, “but the right can’t accept anything that invalidates their persecution complex.”
Jimmy Kimmel
In Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel mocked Donald Trump for potentially violating his probation by transporting a gun to Florida. “Who does this guy think he is, Hunter Biden?” he joked.
“I don’t know what he’s thinking,” Kimmel added. “He claims the gun was lawfully moved to Florida, which is the same thing he said about the classified documents he had stacked up around the toilet in the guest room.
“Why does he even have a gun?” Kimmel wondered. “He’s surrounded by Secret Service agents. Maybe he’s trying to protect himself from the windmills out there trying to kill him? How would a gun even work with those tiny fingers? Can they even reach? Giving Trump a gun is like giving a dog a saxophone.”
Kimmel also touched on Hunter Biden’s conviction, which “put a bit of a dent in the whole ‘Joe Biden controls the legal system’ claim that has permeated the Maga-verse now. After months of saying ‘Biden has the Department of Justice rigged,’ his own son is facing 25 months in prison, which makes it fairly clear that isn’t true to everyone other than the chinless wonder known as Don Jr.”
In a video posted to social media, Trump’s eldest son called Hunter Biden’s conviction a “decoy”. “Which president’s son is on crack? Because it’s sometimes hard to tell,” Kimmel laughed.
Stephen Colbert
And on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert anticipated his trip to the Vatican as part of an American delegation of comedians to meet Pope Francis … days after the pope reportedly used a homophobic slur. “Why?! Why, Pope Frankie, why? You’re the progressive pope!” Colbert implored. “You’ve made landmark statements in support of same-sex civil union, conducted LGBTQ+ outreach and said of gay priests, ‘who am I to judge?’
“You’re supposed to be the cool pope! An ally!” he continued. “I can’t believe that I am alive for the first time anyone has ever been disappointed by the Catholic church.
“Now all of a sudden, Pope Francis is less pro-LGBTQ than Nascar,” he added referring to the sport’s official “Yaaascar” Pride shirts.
“It’s not easy to be less tolerant than Nascar,” he said. “You know their slogan: ‘Pretty sure our fans did January 6.’”
Behind closed doors, Francis allegedly used a highly offensive Italian term to describe gay men, just two weeks after the Vatican had to issue an apology amid reports that he used the same word in a meeting with bishops. “The bishops tried to stop him but they couldn’t get to him in time, because they can only move diagonally,” Colbert joked.
