Seth Meyers
Seth Meyers returned to 2019 on Thursday’s Late Night, as he discredited several Republican attempts to blame Biden for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and for not providing enough aid to the Ukrainian resistance.
“I know it’s hard to remember, because Trump melted all of our brains by overloading us with nonstop chaos and insanity,” the host said of the year 2019. “History Channel is going to have to launch its own version of ESPN 2 called History Channel: Stuff That Happened Three Years Ago.”
In case you forgot, 2019 is when then-president Trump spoke to Volodymyr Zelenskiy on the phone and threatened to withhold military aid unless the Ukrainian president provided him a political favor; the call underpinned Trump’s first impeachment trial.
Yet in a speech this week, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, blamed Biden for holding up aid to Ukraine. “Are you for real?” Meyers exclaimed. “Does your cable package not have History Channel: Stuff That Happened Three Years Ago? You’re saying Biden is the one who should’ve given Ukraine the aid sooner? The guy you supported tried to extort Ukraine like a mob boss counting singles in the back room of a strip club.”
“I think these guys genuinely believe we don’t remember the Trump administration at all,” he continued. “They all want us to think Trump magically would’ve fixed this by being tough on Putin when we all know the opposite was true.
“Trump slobbered praise all over Putin every chance he had and was desperate to be Putin’s friend,” he added. “And yet Trump apologists continue to craft this insane mythology where somehow Trump would’ve stopped Putin from invading Ukraine.
“The idea that Donald Trump would’ve been tough on Vladimir Putin is, quite frankly,” to quote the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, “bullcrap.”
Trevor Noah
“While Russia’s military hasn’t had a lot of success recently in terms of capturing Ukrainian territory, that doesn’t mean that the military hasn’t been successful at killing Ukrainian civilians,” said Trevor Noah on the Daily Show.
From daily reports of Ukrainian schools, shelters or hospitals hit by Russian airstrikes, to cities under siege and evacuation channels disrupted, “I honestly don’t know what the point of it all is,” he added. “Like unless Putin’s plan is to win over the Ukrainian people with the world’s largest case of Stockholm syndrome, what is he doing?
“But either way, Ukraine has been saying for weeks that Russia is guilty of war crimes, and now it looks like the president of the United States agrees,” as Joe Biden called Putin a “war criminal” after Zelenskiy’s address to Congress this week.
The Kremlin called the remark “absolutely unacceptable and inexcusable”, and pointed to the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the second world war. “Ah, seriously Russia, you’re going to bring up something America did in the 40s?” said Noah. “America has committed plenty of war crimes since then, keep up with the times, yo!
“And just because America committed war crimes doesn’t mean you have to as well, Vladimir Putin,” he added. “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too? No, seriously, would you? I’m just brainstorming ways to end this whole thing.”
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel celebrated “St Green’s Vomit Day, also known as St Patrick’s Day, and also known as the day in which the world’s reddest white people wear green.
“I like St Patrick’s Day – it’s an easy holiday,” Kimmel said. “They encourage you to drink, you don’t have to buy gifts. All you really have to do is wear a shirt you wouldn’t ever wear any other day on the rest of the year.”
Kimmel also addressed Biden calling Putin a “war criminal” and the Kremlin’s fury at the remark. “So today, Biden called him a murderous dictator and a pure thug,” Kimmel joked. “Tomorrow he’s going to call him a stupidhead and it’s going to get real crazy.”
In other Russia news, pharmaceutical companies stopped shipping non-essential drugs to Russia, including Botox, “which is interesting, because Vladimir Putin is widely rumored to use Botox”, Kimmel said. They’re just rumors, but based on one photograph “he absolutely, 100% does,” said Kimmel. “It’s like a real housewife of St Petersburg.
“What a weird time for Russians: their assets are frozen but their foreheads are not,” he quipped.
