Seth Meyers exposed the gaping issue with President Donald Trump’s last-minute national address.
The primetime rant took place last Thursday evening, designed to allow Trump to publicly vent about his long-held claims of a rigged election in 2020. The televised speech included Trump’s accusations that the integrity of elections is broken and the outcomes “vulnerable to being rigged and stolen.”
Trump has stubbornly alleged that he won against Joe Biden in 2020, despite the latter winning by 7 million votes. These allegations were laid out extensively in his speech, aired on Fox News. This includes a claim that China acquired millions of U.S. voter files and subsequently interfered in the election—something Trump has repeatedly purported without evidence.
He repeated these claims seven minutes into his primetime address, saying, “The People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.”
Trump went on to describe “the extent of China’s sinister election meddling,” and ultimately mentioned China 14 times in his 26-minute rant.
On Wednesday, Meyers unpacked Trump’s remarks to his late-audience, saying, “Trump called a primetime address from the White House to publicly accuse China of meddling in the 2020 election, specifically to hurt him.”
However, in an interview just five days after his address, Trump backtracked entirely, seemingly shrugging off his own allegations against China.
Meyers played footage of the conversation with reporters, which took place at the Oval Office.
“Mr. President, are you planning on putting any pressure or consequences on China for what you announced about them meddling in the 2020 election?” a reporter asked.
Trump replied, “Well, we’re going to talk to them about it. It took place a long time ago. I think China is maybe a little bit different today than it was then. But look, they do things, and we do things to them. I’ll be honest. We do things to them too.”
“Where was this in the primetime address?!” Meyers questioned.
“You’re the one who called the primetime address to talk about this,” he continued, pointing at Trump. “I thought the whole point was to lay out the evidence that someone meddled in the election you lost, and now you’re saying you don’t care.”
Meyers concluded, “This is like if Barack Obama had called a prime-time address and said, ‘Tonight, I can report the United States has conducted an operation that found Osama bin Laden and told him, no harm, no foul.’”
