Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert blasted Ron DeSantis on Thursday night’s Late Show, after the Florida governor sent two planes full of Venezuelan asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts. “Hey, Ron, if you’re trying to discourage illegal immigration, maybe don’t send people to one of the loveliest places in New England just in time for leaf-peeping season,” Colbert joked.
“Of course, DeSantis wasn’t sending these folks to the Vineyard to have a good time,” he explained. “He was human trafficking these families as a political stunt.”
The stunt was intended to trigger Martha’s Vineyard residents: “the minute even a small fraction of what those border towns deal with every day is brought to their front door, they all of a sudden go beserk,” DeSantis said. But the town’s state representative, Dylan Fernandes, tweeted that local residents came together to provide food, shelter, healthcare and a play area for migrant children.
“Yes, DeSantis owned those libs by making them look compassionate,” said Colbert. “Just like that cuck Jesus. Send that guy a truckload of lepers, see how he likes it.
“Of course, DeSantis’s hate stunt don’t come cheap,” Colbert added, as Florida’s most recent budget includes $12m to relocate migrants. “Maybe with global warming and all, I’m gonna say Florida should be spending that money on something more useful,” said Colbert, “like snorkels or waterproof meth.”
Jimmy Kimmel
“One of the worst things about Donald Trump are all his dummy mini-mes,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Thursday. “All these elastic pants governors who are pulling their own little stunts to excite the stupid,” such as DeSantis sending two planes of migrant families to Martha’s Vineyard.
“This is a thing they’re doing now,” Kimmel said. “Guys like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott from Texas are using taxpayer money to ship these poor people looking for a better life to places around the United States and then they laugh about it. They think it’s funny.”
Abbott sent a bus full of immigrants to Kamala Harris’s house in Washington, while DeSantis tried to get a rise out of residents in Massachusetts. “Which is interesting, because you know what the people of Martha’s Vineyard did when a plane full of people showed up?” said Kimmel. “They fed them, they gave them clothes, they bought them pizza, they took them in.
“I guess Ron DeSantis doesn’t know about the statue of liberty,” he concluded. “Ron DeSantis is that guy you went to high school with who desperately wanted to be prom king but didn’t have any charisma, so instead he pulled the fire alarm and ruined the dance for everybody.”
Trevor Noah
On the Daily Show, Trevor Noah also ripped Ron DeSantis for using migrant families as a political stunt. “You know, there’s assholes, and then there’s this guy,” he said.
“Sometimes someone is so terrible, the word asshole doesn’t quite capture their essence enough, you know?” Noah continued. “Because like everyone is an asshole. My neighbor is an asshole. Drivers in traffic are assholes. Hell, I’m an asshole. But Ron DeSantis? He’s like the little edges, the little ridges around the asshole that really catch all the shit.
“Remember, Ron DeSantis is the governor of Florida, so why is he grabbing refugees in Texas and shipping them to Massachusetts? Why? So he can prove that America’s immigration system is broken? Yeah, everyone knows that,” Noah fumed. “But instead of pushing lawmakers to actually reform the system, he’s using taxpayer money to what, go viral?
“This is what gets to me: if you told DeSantis to spend the same amount of money helping these asylum seekers, he’d be like, oh, we don’t have the funding for that,’” Noah said. “But to troll the Democrats? Suddenly he’s like ‘put it on my card!’”
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers tried to make sense of more developments from the justice department’s investigation into Donald Trump. “At this point, one can only assume that the justice department already has at its disposal a wealth of information related to the coup attempt on January 6 – the various figures involved in it and the machinations that led up to it,” he said, especially after the newest revelation, that Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows complied with a subpoena by the justice department.
“Wow, even Trump’s former chief of staff is turning over documents now,” said Meyers. “And this is a guy, by the way, who is by all accounts always on his phone.”
Referring to committee testimony over the summer by the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, Meyers recalled that Meadows seemed checked out in the days leading up to the 6 January insurrection. “That is maybe the one and only moment from all the January 6 hearings that I related to,” he said. “If I had sold my soul to Donald Trump and was facing a lifetime of criminal exposure and historical disgrace, I too would check the fuck out. I would have one of those giant Costco containers of cheese balls except be filled with Xanax.”