Late-night hosts discuss Trump’s pressuring of the Georgia governor, the run-off Senate elections and the Covid-19 surge
Seth Meyers
“We are in the worst stage of the pandemic so far, and the outgoing president is laser-focused on two things: overturning the election results and counter-programming Joe Biden’s inauguration,” said Seth Meyers in a bleak first line of Monday’s Late Night.
“We could’ve easily been prepared” for the winter surge, Meyers fumed. “Instead we have to hope our current president,” who has not attended a White House coronavirus taskforce meeting in months and whose experts have taken to Sunday cable shows to warn the public, “is sitting at home in his sweatpants channel surfing and accidentally clicking past Meet the Press on his way to watching, I don’t know, an episode on Ghost Hunters hoping they find one who voted for Biden.”
The president has, however, traveled to Georgia, where he hosted a largely mask-less rally to support Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the two Republican senators on the ballot in the state’s 5 January runoff election. Meyers scoffed at Trump’s claim that he’s worked “harder than I’ve ever worked in my life” to overturn the election: “I’m sure an exhausted nurse working a double shift at a Covid ward was psyched to hear the president bragging that he’s working double shifts scream-tweeting at Fox News and sending his mask-less gargoyle lawyer [Rudy Giuliani] to spray Covid spittle on local elected officials while riding shotgun with witnesses too loony for the Joker.”
Trump also pressured the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, via phone, to convene a special legislative session to override Georgia voters, “also known as ‘coup calling,’” said Meyers. “If you’re not calling this an attempted coup, then what are you calling it? Because that’s what it is. Just because it’s a dumb, lazy coup that won’t work doesn’t mean that it’s not still an attempted coup.
“If Trump walked into a bank with a Nerf gun wearing a mask of his own face and said ‘give me all your money,’ we’d still call it an attempted robbery,” Meyers continued. “We wouldn’t be like, ‘that’s just Trump being Trump, just give him a few bucks and send him on his way.’”
“Well, I guess he would,” Meyers added over a photo of Mitch McConnell. So would Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and a host of other congressional Republicans. “You know what? It’s still not right.”
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert recapped “yet another huge blow to the president’s coup attempt” as the state of Georgia re-certified, for the third time, its election results, once again finding a Biden victory. “Well, like the saying goes: third time’s the same as the first and the second time, only much more humiliating,” Colbert said. “But don’t feel left out, Mr president – Biden may have won the Peach State, but you got impeached, and that will never go away.”
The third recount landed days after Trump again attempted to thwart the election in the state with the phone call to Brian Kemp. “I’m gonna say this is a rough time for those that have been insisting that he’s not really an autocrat,” said Colbert.
“Because let’s be clear here: if you throw out the votes, that’s the end of democracy,” he added. “It’s a short walk from ‘do us a favor, though,’ to ‘make me Mussolini, bro.’”
Trevor Noah
“Clearly Donald Trump is only going to be of limited help,” he added. “But the GOP senators haven’t been able to help themselves.” Both candidates are in hot water over large stock trades made during the pandemic. Asked in a debate last week whether US senators should be allowed to trade stocks, Loeffler – or, as Noah called her, “robot Ann Coulter” – deflected with a vague tirade against attacks on the American dream. “You gotta love how shady rich people always try to act like attacking them is attacking everybody,” Noah commented. “‘If you take away my helicopter parking spot, you’re taking helicopter parking spots away from everybody in this country!’”
The close races will likely come down to voter turnout, Noah continued, which is a potential problem for the GOP, given Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. “That’s right, because they indulged Donald Trump’s bullshit claims of fraud, Republicans might have suppressed their vote so much that they could lose their Senate majority,” Noah said. “In fact, you might say that Trump has put Republicans in quite the pickle.”
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