Late-night hosts ran through the cascade of chaos that was Donald Trump’s second weekend in office.
Seth Meyers
Seth Meyers didn’t mince words when it came to what’s happening in Washington: “Donald Trump is threatening a trade war with multiple countries and plunging us into a constitutional crisis,” the Late Night host said on Monday night.
Just this weekend, Trump fired at least 17 inspectors general and multiple heads of FBI field offices; dismissed federal prosecutors who handled January 6 cases; dismantled USAid funding; instructed federal employees to remove pronouns from their email signatures; conducted immigration raids in Chicago; and ordered water released from two dams in California, claiming more water would have helped with the LA wildfires. The water depleted resources for Central valley farmers and was released into rivers that do not flow to LA.
“I thought you were just going to lower the price of eggs!” Meyers exclaimed. “What is all this other shit? It’s like hiring a handyman to fix your toilet, and when you come back he’s pulling out the fixtures, rerouting the pipes and replacing your shower with a jacuzzi that also doesn’t work.
“Trump is dismantling the government like he’s hacking away at a stolen Benz in a chop shop,” he added. “Meanwhile, egg prices are soaring with no end in sight.”
Stephen Colbert
“Donald Trump is doing so many stupidly bad things so badly stupidly, that it’s difficult to keep up,” said Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. “Anyone who’s ever had a toddler knows this feeling. You leave the room for one second and when you come back, everything from the bookshelves is on the floor, the walls are covered in ketchup and when you ask who gave the dog a haircut with safety scissors, your kid says, ‘it was DEI.’
“It’s hard to know what to start with,” he continued. “Each of Trump’s disastrous moves deserves top billing. It’s like there’s a long deli line at the counter of incompetence and corruption, and every ticket coming out of that machine says #1.”
This weekend, Trump gave Elon Musk access to the treasury’s payment system; threatened to take back the Panama canal; fired prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases; removed more than 1,000 studies from the CDC website; and had the Pentagon kick out the New York Times, NBC News and NPR in favor of the rightwing outlets Breitbart, the New York Post and OAN. The US Census bureau webpage also went missing this weekend. “Do you know how many Americans that affects?!” Colbert exclaimed. “No, you don’t, because the census data is missing!
“All of those would be huge stories all on their own,” he added, “but they got out-huged this weekend” when Trump announced tariffs of 25% on goods imported from Canada and Mexico. “He’s only been there two weeks and he’s already pissing off the neighbors – ‘Hi I just moved in nextdoor, give me your wifi password or I’m going to poop on your dog.’”
Jon Stewart
On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart dug into Trump and his cronies’ fixation on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), which Trump blamed for the American Airlines crash last week that killed 67 people in Washington. “What they’re trying to do is make the default setting on competence in America a white guy,” he explained.
“That’s what this is: a reset to the factory default,” Stewart continued. “Because of course, these two are there purely based on merit.” He referred to the former Fox News host turned secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, confirmed despite allegations of sexual assault, financial mismanagement and alcohol abuse, as well as the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, also nominated for his pro-Trump comments on Fox News.
“That’s the irony of this whole thing,” Stewart said. “The people standing next to Trump on that terrible night, blaming DEI and trying to reinstall white guys as the only non-suspect pool of hires, are themselves DEI hires.”
Stewart argued that Hegseth, Duffy and others were hired “for one particular identity that they possess: the ass-kisser”. The new DEI, he explained, is “Dick-sucking Ego Inflation”.
The Trump administration’s rhetoric on DEI deliberately “undercuts every Black person, person of color, woman in this country, that the job that they have, they don’t deserve”.
“It’s the mantra in the Republican party that gives you brain-turning moments like this,” he added before a clip of the former Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump declaring: “In the United States of America, we get ahead and succeed by merit and merit alone.”
“Yes, merit and merit alone, says RNC chairwoman Lara – hold on, let me get my glasses – Trump,” Stewart deadpanned. “It was a blind submission, never saw her name on the application.”
Jimmy Kimmel
And on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host reacted to Trump releasing water from two dams in the Central valley. “This might be his craziest one yet – this might top the injecting bleach,” he said.
The water doesn’t only not flow to LA – “anyone will tell you this doesn’t flow to LA,” Kimmel noted – but it depleted resources needed by farmers in the future. Without intervention by Portersville, California, officials, it would have flooded the town. “What if that had happened? What if the image of towns he accidentally flooded was all over social media?” Kimmel wondered. “How would he blame that one on the Mexican transgenders, I wonder. Can someone please open the valve in his head that turns his brain on?”
Trump has been president for just two weeks, and “all hell has broken loose in almost every possible way.” On Saturday, he imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico, then unissued the tariffs on Monday, delaying them for a month. “I guess he must’ve seen the guacamole bill for the Super Bowl party,” Kimmel joked.
