Jimmy Kimmel
Jimmy Kimmel apologized on Monday night for retweeting a misleading video which appeared to show Vice-President Mike Pence choosing to carry empty boxes of PPE supplies for a photo-op.
“Apologizing to the Trump administration for spreading untruth is like apologizing to Barry Bonds for using steroids. It’s hard,” Kimmel said. It was especially hard, Kimmel added, because outrage directed at him for the mistake “was disgusting. Stupid, too, but mostly disgusting,” especially personal attacks on his family.
Kimmel blasted “these people who blindly pledge their allegiance to Donald Trump instead of this country” for their hypocrisy, which “runs so deep they don’t even seem to be aware of it any more. It’s like when an Uber driver wears too much cologne.”
Kimmel apologized on Twitter on Friday, yet Pence’s communications director tweeted repeatedly and exclusively about the mistake on Friday, and, Kimmel added, emailed him to demand an apology on-air, “because this is what they’re thinking about while thousands of Americans are dying every day: jokes from late-night talkshow hosts.”
Still, “it was my mistake, I do apologize to the vice-president again for spreading misinformation about him – spreading misinformation is their thing and I stepped on their toes,” Kimmel said.
“Now that I’ve done that, I’d like the vice-president, since he asked me to apologize, to ask his boss, who lies every time there isn’t a McNugget in his mouth, to apologize for the following perversions of decency and democracy,” Kimmel said, listing off some of the Trump administration’s most egregious actions, including: separating children from their parents at the border, inviting the Taliban to Camp David, siding with Putin over US intelligence, calling neo-Nazis “very fine people”, “ignoring warnings on coronavirus, downplaying the dangers of coronavirus, mishandling the coronavirus, we still don’t have tests for the coronavirus, why are we opening the country when we have no tests for coronavirus?”
Perhaps inevitably, the Twitter feud was escalated by Trump, who took time from his Mother’s Day on Sunday morning to call Kimmel a “last place” host. “So, anyway, this is what the White House is working on and thinking about right now,” Kimmel said. “This really is the dumbest time to be alive.”
Trevor Noah
“For months, President Trump has been saying the coronavirus pandemic isn’t as big a deal as everyone is suggesting, but now the virus is responding by saying, ‘knock, knock, byatch,’” said Trevor Noah on the Daily Show, reacting to news that two White House staff members – Trump’s valet and Pence’s press secretary (and wife of Stephen Miller) Katie Miller – tested positive for the virus. “Oh snap, the coronavirus is now officially in the White House, and that’s scary. Although if it’s like everything else that lands in the White House, it won’t last more than a few weeks,” Noah said over a photo grid of fired Trump staffers.
Coronavirus outbreak in the West Wing: If it’s like everything else that lands in the White House, it won't last more than a few weeks. pic.twitter.com/nBvhPaHL3j
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 12, 2020
“I won’t lie,” he added, “I’m not surprised that this cluster started in Stephen Miller’s house – that dude has always given off major bitten-by-a-bat vibes.”
And yet, the president still refuses to wear a mask. Last week, he and Melania, both sans masks, attended a ceremony for the 75th anniversary of victory in Europe which included several veterans in their 90s. “Whatever Trump’s excuse was, I just hope all those veterans are safe,” said Noah. “Because could you imagine surviving Hitler, only to be taken out by Trump? That would be so anticlimactic. It would be like if Batman beat Bane, and then died slipping on a banana peel.”
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert also addressed the White House’s coronavirus outbreak – specifically, Trump’s apparent incomprehension of testing’s importance. In a press conference on Friday, Trump said of Katie Miller: “She was tested very recently and tested negative, and then today, I guess, for some reason, she tested positive.”
“In the history of dumb things said by Donald Trump – and remember, there will one day be a library filled with them – that might be the dumbest thing he’s ever said,” said Colbert. “Does Trump think the tests are good only if they tell you news you want to hear? ‘My girlfriend took a pregnancy test – it said she wasn’t pregnant. Then we had a bunch of sex, and for some reason all of a sudden, it says she’s having a baby. That’s why these tests aren’t so great. The tests really should start wearing a condom.’”
On Monday afternoon, “to make himself feel better” about his plummeting approval ratings, Colbert said, Trump held a press briefing in the Rose Garden, “and he got it going with one of his classic lies,” telling reporters: “If somebody wants to be tested right now, they’ll be able to be tested.”
“OK, that’s not true,” Colbert interjected. “Lots of people want a test but they can’t get one, because they don’t play in the NBA or aren’t a tiger in the Bronx zoo. So if you want a test, you have to work on your three-pointer or eat a raw gazelle.”
Seth Meyers
“Anywhere between one to two thousand Americans are dying every day from the coronavirus and yet rather than confront that reality, Trump is doing the only thing he knows, and that’s lying his way through it,” said Seth Meyers on Late Night. “He’s trying to dead-eye mind-trick Americans into thinking coronavirus will simply go away.”
For example, Trump told reporters on Friday that coronavirus would soon disappear, even without a vaccine, despite news that two White House staffers had tested positive and a letter from the White House management office encouraging staff to “practice maximum telework” and to “work remotely if at all possible”. “Well, that’s easy for Trump since he’s already spent the last three years teleworking from his home office on the 18th green at Mar-a-Lago,” Meyers deadpanned. “Every time you see him in the Oval Office, that’s just his Zoom background.
“Think about that: the president is telling people to get back into the workforce while his own White House tells employees to stay home,” Meyers continued. “One day he’s going to call a press conference to tell us that murder hornets are fake news while a dozen of them carry him back to their nest.”
