Extract from The Guardian
Late-night
hosts discuss a Trump’s escalating delusions of a return to the
presidency, Jeff Bezos going to space and America’s falling vaccination
rates.
Seth Meyers on Trump reportedly thinking he’ll be reinstated to the White House: ‘If it weren’t so dangerous, it would be sad.’
Last modified on Wed 9 Jun 2021 02.40 AEST
Seth Meyers
After a week away, Seth Meyers returned to Late Night to pick apart the escalating delusions of Donald Trump’s inner circle, who believe he’ll be reinstated to the White House in August. But first, the host mocked a faux-scandal from the weekend, in which it appeared the former president spoke at North Carolina’s state Republican convention with his pants on backwards.
Factcheckers later confirmed that the appearance of zipperless pants was a fluke of low-resolution imaging, which means “you can rest assured that the former president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the man who for four years singlehandedly controlled our nuclear arsenal with the power to destroy all life on Earth knows how to put his pants on”, Meyers said.
Factcheckers at Snopes “looked through photographs taken at the event and published by the visual media company Getty Images that clearly show the former president on stage wearing pants with a zipper in the front”, according to the outlet.
“I love that this country has gone so crazy that Snopes has started to sound like a weary substitute teacher – ‘No, he didn’t have his pants on backwards and no, you’re not allowed to smoke weed if you finish the quiz early!’” Meyers commented.
As for Trump reportedly thinking he will be reinstated to the presidency later this summer, “if it weren’t so dangerous, it would be sad,” said Meyers. “He’s puttering around his golf course telling people he’s going to go back to the White House like a guy who thinks his ex is going to take him back even though she’s already living with another dude.
Trump shut down his blog last week after friends told him the site’s meager traffic was making him “look small and irrelevant”, according to the New York Times. A Washington Post report found that the blog attracted a “staggeringly small” audience, with fewer visitors than the pet adoption site Petfinder and recipe hub Delish.
“Wow, he’s delusional and sociopathic, but somehow he’s the only person on Earth who knows when it’s time to shut down a blog,” Meyers quipped.
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert also riffed on the almost-pants-gate. The brief fascination with Trump’s potentially backwards pants “raised a lot of questions”, he said, “like how did he zip his pants? And was his belt also on backwards? And how lucky are we that this man no longer has the nuclear codes?”
In other news, “America’s billionaires are like unicorns – rarely seen, mostly white, horny and don’t pay taxes,” Colbert said. “But you may not know that there’s more than one kind of billionaire: your run-of-the-mill multibillionaire putters around in their personal submarine like some kind of sea peasant, but the true hyper-elites have their own space programs,” such as Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, who announced this week he intends to go to space this summer.
“As preparation for space flight, Bezos has asked his warehouse workers to show him how to pee discreetly into a tube,” Colbert deadpanned. The astronauts onboard the New Shepard, a spacecraft produced by Bezos-owned Blue Origin, will experience weightlessness for just three minutes – “or as Amazon warehouse workers call it: lunch”.
Trevor Noah
And on the Daily Show, Trevor Noah checked in on Joe Biden’s oft-stated goal to have 70% of adult Americans partially vaccinated by the Fourth of July – a target increasingly appearing just out of reach.
“Ooh, this is going to be close, and honestly, I’m a little worried about how Joe Biden’s going to handle this,” said Noah. “Because if this comes down to the wire, he’s gonna get desperate. Dude’s going to be loading up the fireworks with Moderna needles.
“What’s clear is that vaccinations have plummeted,” Noah added, “which is especially crazy when you consider that unvaccinated people are being given every incentive to get their shot.” State initiatives to encourage vaccinations range from raffles for a million dollars and cars to free beer and a lap around a speedway track. West Virginia’s governor, Jim Justice, even raffled off firearms to those who got the vaccine.
“Is it just me, or are the incentives getting more and more dangerous? ‘We’ll give you free alcohol, we’ll let you speed around a racetrack, hell, we’ll even throw in some guns!’” said Noah. “Like at some point, these incentives are going to start killing more people than the vaccine is saving.”
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