Late-night hosts talked Joe Biden’s visit to Normandy, Donald Trump losing his concealed carry license and Republican fury over his felony convictions.
Stephen Colbert
Wednesday marked the 80th anniversary of D-day, and Joe Biden was in Normandy to commemorate the occasion along with other world leaders and figures. As part of the occasion, the president met with over two dozen veterans who fought on D-day, the youngest of whom was 96.
“These vets did an incredible service to their nation: they made Joe Biden look young,” Stephen Colbert quipped on the Late Show.
“Biden invoked the generation that beat fascism in the 40s to beat it again in the 2020s,” he added. “And the NYPD is doing their part in this fight,” as they are prepared to revoke Trump’s license to carry a gun following his 34 felony convictions. “He’s going to have to change one of his signature brags,” said Colbert, referring to Trump saying that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a single voter.
Colbert broke out his Trump impression for the occasion: “Tell you what, I could still stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and I don’t know, give someone a purple nurple, a sac tap, atomic wedgie, and I wouldn’t lose a single voter.”
“Ever since he was convicted of, again, 34 felonies, Trump has played the victim,” Colbert continued. “He claims that him paying off a porn star was somehow Joe Biden’s idea” and that “Joe Biden is weaponizing the justice department, turning it into the Joe-stapo, railroading his opponents on a fascist Acela, led by commandant Choo-choo-sulini.
“Of course, that is slightly undercut by the fact that Biden does not control the New York state court system,” Colbert continued, and that the Department of Justice is currently investigating several Democratic lawmakers and Biden’s son Hunter, for allegedly lying about not using drugs on a gun purchase form. “Hold on a second, it’s against the law to buy guns while using drugs?” Colbert mused. “OK … who’s going to arrest Florida?”
Jimmy Kimmel
“Donald Trump in 2018 infamously opted not to visit the graves of American soldiers in France because he didn’t want to get his hair wet, and also he called them suckers and losers,” recalled Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday evening. “That’s not a joke! Even though the only thing that he ever stormed was Daniels.”
But “Draft Dodger Don” did “muster up something respectful this morning”, Kimmel continued, reading a Truth Social post from Trump calling D-day soldiers “among the bravest, noblest and greatest Americans ever to walk the Earth”.
“Which I agree with and would even be somewhat moved by,” said Kimmel, “had he not 12 hours earlier posted, ‘What I’ve gone through, no one has ever gone through … I have been under siege.’ And wasn’t Steven Seagal fantastic in that movie?”
Kimmel also relished the fact that because of his felony convictions, Trump will lose his license to carry a concealed weapon. “If you think about it, it’s pretty crazy that a guy who’s not allowed to carry a concealed weapon would be allowed to carry a nuclear weapon,” he said. “This is like your parents saying, ‘You know what, you can’t have a puppy, but if you get good grades, we’ll buy you a werewolf.’”
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers marveled at the fact that the Republican National Committee is making “contingency plans” should Trump be in jail during the party’s national convention. “It’s unreal,” said Meyers. “If he wins, they won’t be able to swear him in on the Bible until that one inmate comes around with the book cart.
“What are those contingency plans, anyway?” he wondered. “Are you testing out fake Zoom backgrounds to cover up the jail cell? Trump is going to be the first candidate in history to accept the nomination in front of a virtual palm tree.”
A week after Trump’s conviction for 34 felony counts, “Republicans, you will not be shocked to learn, are losing their minds,” said Meyers before several clips of talking heads comparing Trump’s conviction to North Korea, Soviet Russia and Putin.
“Not only did Donald Trump get a fair trial, he got the luxury version of a fair trial,” Meyers countered. “He got platinum-status due process. Most criminal defendants in this country don’t get a fraction of the leeway and deference Trump has got and is still getting. He had expensive lawyers, access to all the evidence, he was personally involved in jury selection, the trial happened in full view of the media and the world.”
Meyers added that it was “grotesque” for one Republican commentator to compare Trump to the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny; when Navalny was sentenced to another prison term last year, the trial was held in an unidentified room in the bowels of penal colony IK-6 in the Vladimir region, and news media and Navalny’s family were barred from attending. “Unlike Trump’s family, who weren’t barred from attending, though they did act like they were,” said Meyers.
