Seth Meyers
Late-night hosts looked at Donald Trump’s dark plans for the future should he be re-elected president in 2024, even as his legal woes continued. “The GOP frontrunner is facing four criminal cases and a civil fraud trial, but that has not stopped him from laying out his plan for a second term,” said Seth Meyers on Monday’s Late Night, to “complete his authoritarian takeover of government and install an autocracy of cronies and loyalists if he’s elected next year”.
“This dipshit racist doofus thinks he can swoop in and set up a dictatorship in 2024 despite having like nine sets of handcuffs on him,” he continued. “First of all, he’s surrounded by moronic criminal goons like Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, who can barely string a coherent sentence together without simultaneously committing a crime.”
But that has not stopped Trump from using ominous rhetoric on the campaign trail. At a rally this past weekend, the former president pledged, in honor of veterans, to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs who live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … to destroy America.
“That was supposed to be in honor of veterans? Which veterans were you honoring?” Meyers wondered. “You’re a former gameshow host, you’re not General Hux. Usually veterans want to hear something like we will honor your sacrifice, not ‘we will root out the vermin from within’.”
Jokes aside, “that’s openly fascist rhetoric, and too many Americans have become numb to it because it’s Trump, and he’s a big, sweaty moron who can barely string three words together and sometimes he dances on stage like a guy in locker room who’s trying to towel off his ballsack,” Meyers concluded.
“But Trump is very much planning his authoritarian takeover if he wins in 2024, and it’s clear he’s got the support of the Republican party, which has become a movement fundamentally opposed to democracy.”
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert checked in on the Republican primary, after Tim Scott dropped out of the race, “which means I can now confirm that Tim Scott was in the 2024 presidential race”, he joked.
The South Carolina senator said on Fox News that the voters were telling him “not now, Tim”.
“‘Not now’ is an interesting way to describe a total loss,” Colbert laughed. “It’s like saying ‘doctor, how was the surgery? Is my husband alive?’” to which a doctor responds, “Uh, not now … but he has high hopes for 2028.”
Scott elaborated that he felt divine providence in his decision to run, and that he was “not called to win, but I was certainly called to run”.
“Let me get this straight – the Lord called you to run so he could watch you lose?” Colbert responded.
“One guy who will never drop out of the race even if he loses is Donald Trump,” he quipped, before turning to his “vermin” comments from over the weekend.
“If that chilling sentence rings a totalitarian bell, it’s because, as one historian pointed out, calling people ‘vermin’ was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini,” he noted. “So he’s plagiarizing those guys. It’s going to be soooo awkward when he runs into them in hell.
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel opened with lighter news: the public reunion of Taylor Swift and football star Travis Kelce after her concert in Buenos Aires, Argentina, over the weekend. “These two – I mean, she is on tour around the world and still makes it to his games on Sundays, he’s in the middle of a football season and is flying to Buenos Aires,” he marveled. “They’re making it very hard for every other couple that’s in a long-distance relationship right now – ‘Oh, you can’t make it to my mom’s house for Thanksgiving this year? Travis flew to Singapore for Taylor!’”
Kimmel also took time to mock Donald Trump Jr, who walked into the New York courthouse for his father’s civil fraud trial to chants of “crime family!”
“And that is basically what these people are – a crime family,” said Kimmel. “A very dumb crime family. The Gambozos, if you will.”
Don Jr “is so embarrassing”, Kimmel continued. “He’s on the stand, he’s testifying in this $250m fraud trial and he has to compliment his father, an ‘artist’ with real estate. Yeah, he’s Vincent van Going-to-jail with real estate, is what he is.”
“The amount of ass-kissing in this trial is insane,” he added, mocking Trump’s eldest son for blaming his accountants.
And Trump’s sole remaining sister, Maryanne Trump Berry, died at 86, without a mention from her brother. “I hope he at least has the decency to find her a nice plot on the golf course,” Kimmel quipped.
