Late-night hosts expressed surprise and glee as Matt Gaetz withdrew himself from the attorney general confirmation process.
Seth Meyers
The Late Night host Seth Meyers said that Trump’s presidential comeback hit its “first major roadblock” with his pick for attorney general taking himself out of the process.
Matt Gaetz removed himself after just eight days with Meyers joking that “once again, he can’t even make it to 18”.
The “accused sexual predator” had already been in the centre of a scandal involving sex with a 17-year-old and was now being accused of the same thing with another teenager.
Gaetz “saw the writing on the wall” and stepped down after he was asked to respond to the second allegation. “They asked him for a comment and his comment was I quit,” he said.
Meyers said that Trump’s “entire cabinet is a scandal-plagued army of business orcs and reality TV doofuses” and that Gaetz dropping out “should pave the way to focus on the other dangerous nominees”.
He played a clip of anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr joking that he has so many skeletons in his closet that if they could vote, he would be president. “They’re only skeletons because they refused to get vaccinated for measles,” Meyers quipped.
He added: “Even by Trump’s degraded standards, his staffing picks have been obscene.”
He said that Trump had been going for the “biggest creeps” and returned to Gaetz who was accused of “sex trafficking through Venmo” which, if nothing else, is “deeply lazy”.
Meyers ended by saying the scandal “should serve as a reminder to everyone that politics and journalism still matter”.
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert started by saying that a week out from Thanksgiving, “we already have something to be thankful for” with Gaetz dropping out. “Thank you sweet Turkey Jesus,” he added.
Gaetz was accused of having a threesome on an air hockey table. “Who was the threeway with?” he asked. “Dave and Buster?”
His statement claimed he was dropping out so that he didn’t act as a distraction from Trump and Vance. “All of this attention on this sex criminal was unfairly distracting from the work of all the other sex criminals who’ve been nominated and elected,” Colbert said.
He then said that while Trump is almost about to be president once again, he “will never give up on his true passion: grifting”.
Trump is now selling signed Maga guitars for $1,000. “If you purchase one of these then you are divorced,” he said.
Colbert said it would give you a guitar from “one of the world’s most renowned not guitar players”.
Jimmy Kimmel
On Jimmy Kimmel Live! the host said that Trump was “determined to fill his cabinet with not just clowns but demented sewer clowns”.
Kimmel spoke of Gaetz choosing to “take his Maga hat out of the ring” and also poked fun at his statement about protecting Trump, saying that people “should not be distracted from his critical work of creating other distractions all the time”.
He then asked what critical work Trump actually does other than “watching UFC fights with Kid Rock”.
He spoke of the “damning accusations” against Gaetz and joked that “one thing you can say is he was putting young people to work”.
Kimmel also said he believed that Trump did things in the wrong order joking that “first you nominate Diddy for attorney general then Matt Gaetz”.
There is also a “new conspiracy theory” that on Trump’s recent visit to SpaceX with Elon Musk, he used a body double. Kimmel showed the picture and said that it “looks like he was out at the barbecue and the grill exploded”.
He then asked: “Don’t these conspiracy guys take at least a couple of weeks off after the election?”
