Seth Meyers
“We’re in a moment right now of colliding crises unprecedented in our lifetimes,” said Seth Meyers on Monday’s Late Night, in a bleak assessment of America’s precarious condition as health officials plea for help reining in the coronavirus and Trump still refused to acknowledge the incoming Biden administration. “We’ve surpassed 11mn infections and we’re nearing a quarter of a million deaths with hospital ICUs filling up across the country, and the outgoing president is moping around his bedroom like a teenager who didn’t get invited to Chad’s lake house after prom.”
Instead of addressing the pandemic, Trump took to Twitter over the weekend to continue baselessly contesting the election. “Buddy, you’re still talking about that? That was four years ago. Also, we had another election, and I have terrible news,” Meyers said.
In another tweet, Trump wrote “He won because the Election was Rigged,” before Meyers cut off reading it out loud, as the rest was “the psychotic ravings of a weirdo recluse holed up in his taxpayer-funded hideout. Let’s just savor for a moment the fact that the tweet started with ‘he won.’ It’s like cracking up A Tale of Two Cities and stopping after ‘it was the best of times.’”
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign continued to canvas supporters for donations to its “official election defense fund” although, as Meyers noted, the fine print revealed that any individual donations below $8,000 went to cover the campaign’s debts. “You have to at least give Trump credit for consistency – everything he does is a scam and this one is no different,” Meyers said.
“He went from Trump vitamins to Trump University to Trump recount – they should just send out emails promising free Target gift cards if you send him your birth date, debit card PIN and social security number.”
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert explained how the Covid situation in the US once again turned dire. “For starters, there’s a complete vacuum of leadership, and not just because the president sucks,” he said. Trump has not attended a coronavirus task force meeting since June, when Vice-President Mike Pence published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled There Isn’t a Coronavirus Second Wave.
“Nope, just one giant tsunami of criminal stupidity,” Colbert countered.
Colbert also addressed Trump’s false statement on Twitter that he “won the election”, calling it “the digital equivalent of waking up to find grandpa screaming on the lawn in his underwear. You can’t give him a standard mental cognition test because the first question is ‘Who is the president?’”
Even though a bipartisan election security agency publicly declared the 2020 election “the most secure in history” – “kind of ironic because it defeated the most insecure president in American history,” Colbert quipped – the Trump campaign organized a “Million Maga March” to protest Biden’s victory around the Capitol for the weekend. But the march “wasn’t quite a million”, noted Colbert, as only about 10,000 people participated. “Ten thousand, a million — it’s just how they count,” Colbert said. “You round up for marches, you round down for Covid deaths. It’s all in their textbook, ‘Basic Arith-Maga.’
“So the administration ends as it began, lying about crowd size,” he added. “They’ve come full circle. That’s just basic geo-Maga.”
Trevor Noah
And on the Daily Show, Trevor Noah also recapped the Million Maga March through the streets of the Capitol. “It is interesting how now all the Trump supporters are suddenly OK with protesting and blocking traffic. How quickly their attitudes have changed!” he deadpanned. “I bet we’re only three months away from them kneeling at football games like, ‘I will not stand for the anthem of a country that does not support my Maga-ness.’”
It’s not a surprise that people don’t believe Biden won, said Noah, since they’re taking direction from the president’s recalcitrance; Trump falsely tweeted over the weekend that he won the election (Twitter flagged his claim noting “official sources called this election differently”.)
“For all the talk about Trump being an aspiring dictator, this is some weak shit,” Noah said. “Like, now is the time he should be taking over all the state capitals, installing new governors, arresting opposition leaders, doing all of that. Instead, he’s just sitting at home trying to manifest a win on Twitter like a little bitch.”
Trump’s attempt to overturn Biden’s victory isn’t going well in the courts, either, as campaign lawsuits were dismissed in Pennsylvania and Arizona; a top lawyer with Jones Day, which has represented the Trump campaign for four years, told colleagues that the firm would not get involved in additional election litigation.
“Damn, Donald, you’re losing court cases all over the place,” said Noah. “It’s almost like a miracle – he took one election loss and turned it into a thousand more losses.”