When Seth Meyers wants to go deep into the nuances of a specific issue facing the country, he takes “A Closer Look.” When he’s just pissed off about something, he opts for a more direct method with a segment called “Hey!”
Thursday night, it was the Trump administration’s decision to undo federal protection for transgender students that had the Late Night host up in arms.
“Hey! What are you doing?” Meyers began. “As I understand it, you were elected to bring jobs back to the U.S. Now you don’t want to let transgender kids use the bathroom of the gender they identify with? Do you think that’s why the auto industry went to Mexico? For the bathrooms?”
“First you demonize Muslims, then immigrants and now the transgender community,” he continued. “Hey! Just because you want to bring back coal mining doesn’t mean you have to bring back everything from the 1800s.”
As Meyers, who recently accepted the Human Rights Campaign’s Equality Award for drawing attention to issues like this one, went on to highlight a tweet Trump posted last year in which he vowed to “fight for” the LGBT community and warned that Hillary Clinton would bring in immigrants who would “threaten” their “freedoms and beliefs.”
“Did you not mean to include the word ‘for?’” Meyers asked.
Citing the main conservative critique of allowing transgender women to use women’s restrooms, Meyers said some believe they will “use it as a ruse to sneak into restrooms and grab people by the genitals.” But, he added, “If you’re looking for the kind of person who would do that, you need to look no further than the Oval Office.”
Meyers ended with a message for Melania Trump, who has said she wants to make “anti-bullying” her primary focus as first lady. “Now I know where you can start,” he said.
It turns out that when Trump let Caitlyn Jenner use the ladies’ room at Trump Tower last April, he was just being nice to his fellow reality television star.
