In his first “closer look” of 2017, Seth Meyers returned to an all-too-familiar target: President-elect Donald Trump.
There was plenty to cover since Meyers signed off on New Year’s Eve, but almost all of it centered on Trump’s increasingly prolific Twitter account. Instead of projecting an image of “calm” during this transition period, Trump has been “tweeting obsessively about some of the least important things you could possibly imagine,” the Late Night host said, pointing to posts on the ratings for the new Celebrity Apprentice to Meryl Streep’s acceptance speech at the Golden Globes.
“Trump’s impulsive stream-of-consciousness tweets might seem embarrassing for an incoming president,” Meyers said, “but Trump is apparently proud of his Twitter presence,” even boasting that friends call him “the Ernest Hemingway of Twitter.”
“Though I would say you’re just the Ernest of Twitter,” Meyers said, referring to the Jim Varney movies of the early ’90s. “Seriously, if Ernest Hemingway heard you say that, he would kill himself again.”
In response to Streep’s bold takedown of his “instinct to humiliate” at the Golden Globes, Trump tweeted early Monday that she is one of the most “over-rated” actresses in Hollywood. “Overrated?” Meyers asked. “She’s so good, people use her to compliment people in other professions. Like LeBron James is the Meryl Streep of basketball, or Donald Trump is the Meryl Streep of having thin skin.”
Whether Trump’s tweets are “calculated distractions or the ramblings of an unhinged narcissist,” Meyers said the president-elect would prefer to keep the focus on celebrity feuds like the one with Streep, instead of the intelligence report that concluded Vladimir Putin personally ordered the hack that may have helped get Trump elected.
Meyers went on to mock Trump for his seeming incoherence on anything having to do with computers and suggesting hand-delivered messages were preferable to electronic communication.
“Great, or you could just go full Lannister and communicate by raven,” the host said, referencing Game of Thrones. “Oh wait, you can’t,” he added. “I just remembered: A Lannister always pays his debts.”