Late-night hosts took aim at Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s too-close relationship and how one is clearly in control of the other.
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers spoke about how voters have been most concerned about grocery prices yet Trump has been “easily distracted by silly stuff” and placed his attention elsewhere.
This week saw him elected chair of the Kennedy Center, which led to Meyers joking that the next round of honors would include “Kid Rock, Lee Greenwood and Big Mouth Billy Bass”.
It’s meant that he’s had less time to help Musk in his project of “dismantling the government”. Meyers joked that it’s “fun sometimes to pretend bad things might be good things”.
In audio from a call about the Kennedy Center, Trump said he was going to make it “hot” again like he had also made the presidency. “You didn’t make the presidency hot unless you mean hot like a low-grade fever,” he said.
Another “frivolous distraction Trump is obsessed with” concerns him renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has led to Associated Press journalists being banned from official press events as they refuse to obey. “At least give people like a week to process it!” Meyers said.
He also said that “we should stop waiting for tech companies to be part of the pushback” with both Google and Apple following the change on official maps.
Meyers played a clip of Trump trying to explain Musk’s dismantling, which was a ramble about magnets, tractors and planes. “Every time Trump speaks I feel like a guy who started season two of Severance without watching season one,” he said.
He said they want to avoid talking about what’s really happening as “the reality of what they’re doing is unpopular and illegal” and Musk essentially wants “direct control of the government” by taking over the regulatory group that would otherwise be able to stop his business practices.
He said that there is “a lot of bad stuff happening right now” and “they’re trying to rip you off and they hope you’ll be distracted by all the nonsense going through Trump’s head”.
Jimmy Kimmel
On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host spoke about the nationwide shortage of eggs with grocery stores hiking prices and limiting the number of eggs customers can purchase.
He said that regular eggs are now “more valuable than Faberge”.
For Valentine’s Day, he joked that Trump has “got a little something for his sugar vladdy” after a call with Vladimir Putin in which the Russian dictator was given essentially everything he wanted out of the negotiation.
Kimmel said it is “honestly amazing the guy only bankrupted three casinos” while saying that “if you attack and murder our allies, it will make no difference at all”.
Trump’s rambling explanation led Kimmel to say that we are “one weird press conference away from Trump saying he wants to move Ukraine to Gaza”.
Then, “as if we don’t have enough to worry about”, Kimmel said that “measles and wide-leg jeans are back”, joking about Kendrick Lamar’s outfit choice at the Super Bowl.
He reassured us that “Bobby Brainworm is on the job” to fix measles with the outspoken anti-vax crusader confirmed as the new head of health and human services.
In a press conference, Robert F Kennedy Jr said that God sent him Trump. “Next God is gonna send us diphtheria,” Kimmel joked.
The clip saw Kennedy engage in “triple-A ass kissing”, which Kimmel said would have aroused Trump. “Melania couldn’t turn him on like that the first night they met,” he joked.
