America’s late-night TV hosts were left baffled by the president’s attempted tribute to his friend and ally Lindsey Graham, who died over the weekend.
Graham died suddenly on Saturday night, sending shockwaves through Washington. The South Carolina senator, who was 71, suffered an aortic dissection.
Trump was one of the last people to speak to the lawmaker, who had become a staunch MAGA ally in his final years. But the 80-year-old president’s eulogy for Graham was rambling and incoherent, as the hosts of The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Night with Seth Meyers were quick to point out.
On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart spent a chunk of his opening monologue dissecting Trump’s tribute. The TV anchor was particularly troubled by the president declaring to Fox News that while Graham called him all the time, he would respond, “Stop calling me, Lindsey.”
Stewart imitated Trump, saying, “I’ll never forget the way that I always let him go to voicemail. It was our thing.”
He then joked that Trump had “zoomed through the first five stages of grief and gone straight to number six: f--- that guy!”
Trump’s rambling discussion about Graham included an unsolicited numerical assessment. The president referred to Graham’s criticism over the Jan. 6 Capitol riots in 2021, using this to knock his score down a point: “99 out of 100.”
Responded Stewart, “You know, my favorite part of any eulogy is when they announce the person’s life score. He’s doing a eulogy like it’s Portnoy doing a pizza review.”
Meanwhile, Jimmy Kimmel’s guest host of the week, comedian Ike Barinholtz, began by saying, “What a crazy weekend. Mitch McConnell’s alive. Lindsey Graham is dead. There’s so many opportunities to get Jimmy’s show pulled off the air again.”
“No one summed up Lindsey’s life better than our favorite president and his good friend Donald John Trump,” Barinholtz continued sarcastically, pointing to the president’s comments about his late golf buddy. Trump said of Graham’s abilities: “He loved playing golf. Loved being outside. He played golf with people and you just liked him. It wasn’t that he was a great striker of the ball. It was, he wasn’t exactly a perfect… He wasn’t Jack Nicklaus. He was not Tiger, but he loved it.”
“Wow,” Barinholtz said. “He sucked at golf, and now he’s dead.”
Trump also used his eulogy as another opportunity to speak about rigged elections. “No Trump eulogy for Lindsey Graham would be complete without a loose five on rigged elections,” the Jimmy Kimmel Live! host explained, playing Trump’s rant on Fox.
As the audience laughed, Barinholtz said, “We all grieve in different ways. You know, there’s stages to grief. It’s denial, anger, spacing out, pissing yourself, forgetting what you were talking about, and then changing the subject completely. It’s a process.”
Finally, Seth Meyers was on the same page as Stewart, equally appalled by Trump’s comments about Graham’s repeated calls.
“In a phone interview this morning with Fox and Friends, President Trump said that the late Senator Lindsey Graham would call him all the time, and added, ‘I’d say, “Stop calling me, Lindsey,’” said Meyers.
“What a touching tribute. Very rare for the person giving the eulogy to say, ‘I wish I’d talked to him less.’”
Meyers also mocked Trump’s Truth Social post about the late senator, in which he mourned Graham but also said, “Details and arrangements to follow.”
“Wait, why are you in charge of the arrangements?” laughed Meyers. “He has a family!”
