Seth Meyers really doesn’t like Donald Trump. The former SNL writer turned late-night host turned in one of the better anti-Trump stand-up routines at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner—you know, back when the former reality star hinted at the unbridled racism yet to come by questioning whether our first black president was born in America.
Now, Trump is the Republican nominee for POTUS and Meyers is behind the desk hosting Late Night with Seth Meyers, a platform he’s used to torch the real estate heir on numerous occasions during his “A Closer Look” segment. So, after a couple of weeks off due to NBC’s Olympics coverage, Meyers returned to his show Monday night with a few things to get off his chest.
“The 2016 campaign has settled into something of a pattern: Donald Trump spends weeks saying inflammatory things that drive his poll numbers down, then for a few days he acts relatively normal, and the media thinks he’s ready to get serious,” said Meyers. “Well, it’s happening again—even as Trump surrounds himself with people who feed his worst instincts.”
Just a few months before Election Day, Trump’s campaign experienced yet another major shake-up, with the cotton candy-haired Kremlin apologist kicking his campaign chief Paul Manafort to the curb over his shady financial ties to a pro-Russian political movement in Ukraine. Instead, he hired Steve Bannon, the former honcho of Breitbart News—an alt-right website that’s acted as extended PR for candidate Trump—as his campaign head, while also reportedly seeking the counsel of disgusting former Fox News boss Roger Ailes, who was forced to step down after a series of disturbing sexual harassment allegations surfaced.
“So, Trump got rid of his old campaign chairman who was trying to get him to tone down his rhetoric and hired people who want him to be even more controversial. Trump’s like an alcoholic who fires his doctor and starts getting medical advice from his bartender,” joked Meyers. “I actually think this new Trump inner circle makes perfect sense. Trump is surrounding himself with the very people who created the right-wing media bubble—a bubble built on paranoia, conspiracy theories, and white identity politics which allowed Trump to thrive in the first place.”
Meyers teed off on Bannon, an unhinged right-wing propaganda filmmaker who’s like a cross between Dinesh D’Souza and Alex Jones. “Let’s first take Bannon, whose website Breitbart News has run headlines, among other things, accusing President Obama of shedding ‘phony fascist tears’ and calling a conservative Trump critic a ‘renegade Jew,’” said Meyers. “And then there was this classic Breitbart headline: ‘Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,’ and if anyone should be the judge of who’s unattractive and crazy, it’s pin-up model Steve Bannon. He looks like Jabba the Hutt’s deadbeat son.” “Then there’s former Fox News chairman and current Jabba the Hutt Roger Ailes, who was forced out after an alleged pattern of sexual harassment and is reportedly advising Trump,” Meyers continued. “Ailes essentially shaped the modern conservative movement, so it’s no surprise that Trump is now using many of Ailes’s tactics.”
These tactics include denying all the polls that show Trump is trailing Hillary Clinton by considerable margins, culminating in Trump attorney Michael “You Cannot Rape Your Own Spouse” Cohen’s jaw-dropping CNN appearance where, when questioned about how Trump is losing according to every conceivable metric, replied, “Says who?”“Says who isn’t just a dumb Trump supporter’s response to a few polls, it’s the right’s reaction to everything—from climate change to unemployment numbers to health care. Says who is the product of decades of work by Ailes and others to dismiss facts that don’t align with their worldview,” offered Meyers. “And now, with members of the alt-right conservative media advising Trump, they’ve latched on to yet another conspiracy theory: this time questioning Hillary Clinton’s physical health, despite zero evidence and repeated assurances from her doctor that she’s fit to serve as president.”
Yes, despite the fact that Hillary Clinton appeared totally fine during her lengthy DNC speech, hasn’t exhibited any clear signs of ill health, and had her doctor release a detailed 2-page note on her health declaring her “fit” to serve as president—this compared to Trump’s sketchy doctor’s note from a wacky gastroenterologist that sounded as if it was written by Trump himself, Trump has chosen to regurgitate alt-right conspiracy theories claiming that Hillary is in poor health.
As Trump claimed during a recent interview, “she’ll do an event, she’ll make a short speech off a teleprompter, and then she goes home and goes to sleep. I’ll tell you, she is—she is dangerous.”
“That’s right: Hillary Clinton sleeps at night, and she sleeps great,” said Meyers. “You know why? Because she’s seen the polls. All of them. Also, it’s not dangerous to sleep! Dangerous is staying up until 4 a.m. and hate-tweeting Morning Joe.”