Late-night hosts talked Kamala Harris’s debate preparation, Donald Trump’s meandering non-answers in recent interviews, and Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Harris.
Seth Meyers
On Monday’s Late Night, Seth Meyers identified an ongoing pattern: “Donald Trump says something insane or incoherent or wildly offensive about crowd sizes, or fallen soldiers, or Hannibal Lecter, or the price of bacon going up because the wind doesn’t blow, or shark attacks that are caused by electric boat batteries that sink in the ocean and electrocute people unless they swim away from the battery toward the shark.
“That’s all real stuff he said,” said Meyers with chagrin. “He’s tied in the polls, and that’s all real stuff he said in real life.”
A new poll found that 28% of likely voters need to know more about where Harris stands on the issues. “And that’s fair, and she should address that,” said Meyers. “But if you’re wondering what her opinion on wind vis-a-vis the price of bacon is, she doesn’t fucking have one. Nobody has one but him.”
But speaking of that pattern, Meyers outlined a continual media ritual: “Trump’s sun-downing mush brain belches out a series of unintelligible noises and then Republicans go on TV and they just plead with him, ‘focus on policy’.”
“There’s no way you guys actually believe what you’re saying, right?” he said after several clips of Fox News commentators and Lindsey Graham urging Trump to focus on issues. “Donald Trump can’t focus on policy. He’d have an easier time doing one of Simone Biles’s signature moves.”
To illustrate his point, Meyers played a nearly two-minute clip of Trump answering a question about childcare at The Economic Club of New York, with a break to note that “it’s so meandering and incoherent and mind-numbing, we just had to take an intermission so our brains could recover.”
Trump’s nonsense non-answer, in which he kept referring to “the numbers”, ended with “it’s about making America great again,” to polite claps from the audience.
“What the hell are you guys clapping for?” Meyers exclaimed. “This is how low the bar is for Trump: he could streak naked across the stage covered in baby oil, screaming ‘baba booey’, then trip and fall headfirst into a garbage can, stand up, run into a wall, fart and pass out. But if he says ‘make America great again’ as he comes to, they’ll all clap and say, ‘Well you know what? This is a new Trump.’”
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert previewed Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia, where Harris needs to connect with undecided voters. “Once again, a presidential election comes down to undecided voters,” the host said. “You know their slogan: we can’t pick a slogan.
“Her tactics for taking down Trump are a little different than Biden’s,” Colbert explained. Unlike the president, Harris has not focused on squarely portraying Trump as a fundamental threat to American democracy. “Also unlike Joe Biden, she has decided not to spend large portions of the debate staring hauntingly into space like an ancient dog seeing a ghost in the corner of the room that no one else can see,” Colbert joked.
Harris has reportedly been holed up for five days in a Pittsburgh hotel doing highly choreographed debate practice sessions. “Wow, I’m really looking forward to that choreography,” Colbert joked before breaking out the macarena.
Trump, on the other hand, prefers not to prepare for the debate, so his advisers have taken to calling debate prep “policy time”. “He’s a 78-year-old toddler!” Colbert laughed. “Don’t worry, Donald, it’s not debate practice. It’s policy time. Do you need to go policy? You don’t? Tell you what, why don’t we all try to go policy, just to try, before we head over to the debate.”
And in other news, former vice-president Dick Cheney said he will vote for Kamala Harris. “Well, I’ll be,” said Colbert. “When I heard that news, you could’ve knocked me over with a shotgun to the face.”
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel also looked ahead to Tuesday’s debate. “The candidates will field questions on all the big issues: the economy, immigration, electrocution, sharks, everything we care about,” he said.
“There’s a lot riding on this. If Kamala doesn’t do well, come January, our national bird might become the Kentucky fried chicken,” Kimmel quipped.
Democrats are concerned about a new New York Times poll that found Trump up by 1% nationally going into the debate. The Trump team gloated, “which is surprising from the guy who said the failing New York Times has been wrong about me from the very beginning”, said Kimmel. “I guess the news at the New York Times is only occasionally fake.”
Kimmel dismissed the polls as unscientific. “Has anyone ever taken one of these polls? No,” he said. “You know why? They call you on the phone. The New York Times should say that Donald Trump has a 1% lead among lunatics who answer unknown calls on their telephones.”
