Late-night hosts react to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump this weekend at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Seth Meyers
Seth Meyers opened Monday’s Late Night, a largely humorous look at the Republican National Convention, with a serious note about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania this weekend, which killed one man in the crowd.
“Political violence must be rejected in all its forms – it is both morally wrong and a poison to democracy,” Meyers said. “We must all condemn it and repudiate it and do everything in our power to stop it.”
Meyers added that prep for Monday’s show reminded him of the immediate aftermath of January 6. “I said then that multiracial, pluralistic democracy is fragile and precious,” he recalled. “It requires our vigilance, stewardship and protection. That’s as true now as it was then, and in light of the horrific events at a Trump rally on Saturday, it’s clear that we must recommit ourselves to that endeavor as fully and as steadfastly as we can.”
Meyers encouraged his audience to avoid spiraling “into despair”, and then condemned the regularity of gun violence in America. “Schools, shopping malls, grocery stores, movie theaters, houses of worship and now political rallies have all been infected by this scourge of everyday violence,” he said. “We cannot accept that there are too many guns. They’re too easy to get. We must work to change that.
“There is no autopilot setting for democracy,” Meyers added. “Every generation before us has had to do the difficult work of safeguarding this cherished enterprise, and now we’re called upon to do the same. That can feel at times like a daunting task, but the case for optimism and perseverance is this: those generations succeeded. They protected democracy and passed it on to us. They witnessed political violence, from assassinations, to campaigns of racist terror, to attempted coups and they refused to succumb to a society where reason and humanity have failed, where violence rules. They built something better, and now it is our task to hold on to it.”
Later in his monologue, Meyers took time to blast Trump’s new running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, for his comments on the shooting. Vance posted on X: “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
“At a time when things are bad, you are choosing to make things worse,” Meyers retorted. “You are choosing to inflame the national mood at a dangerous moment rather than show the leadership and basic decency it would take to calm things down. You should be ashamed. Please stop.”
“You’re also wrong,” he continued. “Engaging in the work of democracy and peaceful persuasion is the opposite of inciting violence. It’s what we need more of, not less. Accurately describing the dangers of autocracy and warning against attempts to dismantle our democracy have nothing to do with political violence.”
Stephen Colbert
And on the Late Show, Stephen Colbert opened with a somber pre-taped segment from his desk. “The United States came close to a great tragedy on Saturday when at a political rally down in Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old gunman shot and nearly killed a former president and the man who today became the 2024 Republican nominee,” he said. “My immediate reaction when I saw this on Saturday was horror at what was unfolding, relief that Donald Trump had lived and, frankly, grief for my beautiful country. And then fresh horror, as we learned that attendees had also been shot, one of whom died at the rally.”
Colbert noted that he sat at the desk as he has in prior moments of shock at violence in the US, though “I could just as easily start the show moaning on the floor, because how many times do we need to learn the lesson that violence has no role in our politics, that the entire objective of a democracy is to fight out our differences with – as the saying goes – a ballot, not a bullet.”
He continued that a friend texted him after the shooting: “How is this happening in America in 2024?”
“I understood his shock,” Colbert said, “but I’m old enough that one of my earliest memories is sitting in a dark room with my sister watching my parents’ little black-and-white TV, and seeing Bobby Kennedy’s coffin on that slow train from New York down to Washington. And whether the result of extremist politics or mental illness, that violence is with us still — from the shooting of a GOP baseball practice that seriously injured Steve Scalise, to the plot to kidnap and kill Governor Gretchen Whitmer, to the hammer attack that nearly killed Paul Pelosi, to the horrors of January 6th, to this most recent attack.”
He noted that the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was “someone barely out of boyhood who reportedly donated to a Democratic group in 2021, then registered as a Republican that same year.
“We may never understand his motivation, nor is that necessarily our job,” he added. “Our job as American citizens reject violence and violent rhetoric in this time of crisis, however hard we want to fight for our ideas.
“Not only is violence evil, it is useless,” he concluded, returning to a quote from science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that he invoked when Scalise was shot: “‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’ Violence, or even calls for violence, invalidate any ideas.
“In the wake of this attack on Saturday, many Americans on both sides of the aisle, from President Biden to Speaker Johnson, are calling on all this to change how we see each other, how we treat each other, how we talk to each other,” he said. “That may or may not happen, but those conflicting ideas will remain the same.”
