Late-night hosts talked Donald Trump’s classified documents scandal and fearmongering that the FBI’s 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid was an assassination attempt.
Stephen Colbert
“We’ve been talking about Donald Trump’s hush-money trial for three weeks now,” said Stephen Colbert on Wednesday’s Late Show, “and I for one am thrilled that he’s not in court today, so that we can talk about anything else! Like Donald’s Trump’s classified documents trial.”
That upcoming trial, one of four criminal cases Trump faces, was indefinitely postponed by a judge last month. But new documents unsealed in the case show that “that scandal is exactly much worse than we could’ve thought”, said Colbert, as Trump’s lawyers reportedly found classified documents in his bedroom four months after the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.
“Oh my God, the only thing more shocking to find in Donald Trump’s bedroom would be a current wife,” Colbert quipped.
“So these documents spent as much as four months right next to Donald Trump’s bed,” he added. “It explains why the stamp changed from ‘classified’ to ‘kill me’.”
The judge in the case admonished Trump for failing to identify and turn in the classified documents in his bedroom. “Now, to be fair, Trump rarely goes into his bedroom,” Colbert noted. “As we’ve recently learned, he does most of his sleeping in court.”
Jimmy Kimmel
Jimmy Kimmel also looked into the files that were unsealed on Tuesday in Trump’s stolen documents case, revealing that when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in 2022, the agents were authorized to use deadly force if necessary. “Which is standard operating procedure whenever the FBI execute a search warrant,” Kimmel explained. “But in the Maga-verse, it is a plot to kill Donald Trump.
“This would actually be funny if it wasn’t so stupid and dangerous,” he added.
The far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Biden’s justice department and FBI were “planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light”.
“What a rich imagination this woman has,” Kimmel deadpanned. “You’d almost think she has the brain of a child, you know?”
The FBI emphasized in a statement that “there was no departure from the norm in this matter”. But “did that stop the rightwing outrage machine from spinning like mad? Oh, of course it didn’t,” said Kimmel with chagrin.
According to Republicans, “the diabolical mastermind Joe Biden sent an elite team of ultra-liberal FBI agents to assassinate Donald Trump, but somehow he slipped out the back door,” Kimmel laughed. “Somehow they missed the fact that the loudest and most famous man in America and all 15 Secret Service agents were in New Jersey at the time that they raided Mar-a-Lago.
“These people, these hysterical, dishonest stooges he has jockeying for lip space on his big pink ass, they’re so dramatic,” he added. “When it comes to, like, the temperature in the courtroom, it’s a freezing ice box. Recovering stolen documents is an assassination attempt. But this?” he said over clips of January 6 rioters breaking windows and storming the Capitol. “That’s just tourism!”
The Daily Show
Trump’s assassination conspiracy makes Joe Biden sound way too cool pic.twitter.com/PApEG951Ec
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 23, 2024
And on The Daily Show, guest host Michael Kosta mocked Trump’s fundraising email in which he falsely claimed the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago constituted an assassination attempt. According to Trump, “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out.”
“Holy shit, locked and loaded? Ready to take me out? I’ve never heard Joe Biden sound so fucking cool in my life,” Kosta joked. “I always thought of Biden as a doddering old man, but Donald Trump makes him look like one of the Expendables.
“Now personally, I think it would be very difficult to assassinate Donald Trump, mostly because he would never get that close to a book depository,” he added. “But regardless, I don’t think Trump actually fears getting assassinated by Joe Biden. And the reason is because he announced it in a fundraising email. If you’re dodging bullets, you don’t stop to wave your Venmo QR code.”
