Late-night hosts took aim at Trump’s latest set of decisions, labelling his travel ban “immoral, embarrassing and inhuman”.
In her show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, the comic talked about reality TV star turned president Donald Trump’s executive order that restricts travel from a number of Muslim-majority countries. She detailed how incompetent the rollout had been.
“Give Trump’s ban some credit,” she said. “It was the healthcare.gov of Islamophobia, the Ford Pinto of intolerance, a big fat cocktail of New Coke and Zima poured on to a Microsoft Zoom playing an endless loop of the Star Wars prequels’ Jar Jar Binks scenes.”
Bee also talked about how ineffective similar orders have been before. “We learned years ago that using national origin as a basis for exclusion didn’t work and it pissed off our allies,” she said. “Oh hey, you know what does work to prevent terrorist attacks? When presidents pay attention in their security briefings!”
She then discussed the tearful reaction of Democrat Chuck Schumer, who Trump then mercilessly ridiculed on television.
“I’m sorry, who’s the bigger sissy?” she said. “The Holocaust victim’s great-grandson who teared up over families being torn apart or the guy who’s afraid to walk down stairs?”
Bee also touched upon the hypocrisy surrounding the issue of religious freedom, which is often used as a front for discrimination and how Trump’s latest order infringes upon the concept.
“When a Rite Aid cashier says ‘happy holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas’ that is religious oppression but when you’re a legally approved green card holder who’s refused entry to the United States, forced to surrender your green card, sent to Ethiopia even though you’re from Yemen and left in ‘Tom Hanks limbo’ at the Addis Ababa airport, that’s an inconvenience,” she said.
She also delved into the American stance on immigration in more detail and explained the difference between a refugee and an immigrant. “The US’s refugee preference is for women and children,” she said. “It’s almost as if the sole criterion for getting in is that your hand can’t be larger than the president.”
Bee brought up the widely circulated statistics that showed the chances of being killed by a refugee were “slightly lower than your odds of getting to make out with Idris Elba while being struck by lightning”.
She then gave the order some historical context, referring back to the way foreigners were treated at the time of the second world war. “The way America welcomed the last non-Christian war refugees to knock at our door is one of the most shameful stains on our history, which is saying a lot,” she said.
Trump’s latest action was called “immoral, embarrassing and inhuman” and “the act of a giant pussy”.
She went hard on his cowardice, calling him “a man who is afraid of germs, stairs, books, unprocessed food, women, birds, Muslims, Russian pee tapes, inner cities and of course, strong winds”.
Trump’s SCOTUS nominee Neil Gorsuch is a conservative’s wet dream. https://t.co/KeZxWO8l6S pic.twitter.com/nzrYgj8V0N
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) February 2, 2017
On The Daily Show, Trevor Noah briefly touched upon Trump’s supreme court pick, the ultra-rightwing Neil Gorsuch.
He joked: “Goddamn, that guy’s conservative. I bet the GOP elephant is jizzing out of his trunk right now.”
He spoke of the Republican immaturity over their refusal to allow Obama to make a supreme court pick, calling it “petulant bad behavior for an entire year”.
He then showed a clip of Gorsuch talking about his grief over the death of Antonin Scalia which he found out about while skiing, causing him to cry so hard it was difficult to see. “Not only did they get to fill Scalia’s seat with a like-minded jurist, they found a man who admired Scalia so much it hurts,” he said. He called it “the whitest thing I’ve ever heard”.
Seth Meyers also discussed the choice of Neil Gorsuch and Trump’s assertion that people might be surprised by his decision. He joked: “Twelve days into your presidency, the part of me that can be surprised is dead.”
Meyers went on: “If you had nominated a rabid bat in a judicial robe, I would have said ‘that tracks’.”
He commented that Trump is still running the government like a reality show but that he misunderstands why such shows are popular. “Americans only enjoy reality shows because they have nothing to do with reality,” he said. “No one would enjoy The Bachelor if it had real-world consequences: ‘Ooh if he gives her the rose, abortions will be illegal.’”
He then added: “Anyone who was hoping for a woman or a person of color was kidding themselves. It was always going to be a white guy, and Neil Gorsuch looks like the silhouette Facebook gives you when you don’t have a profile picture yet.”
Stephen Colbert spent time ridiculing Trump’s much-criticized speech to celebrate Black History Month, as he sat next to “the two black people he knows – Ben Carson and Omarosa”.
Trump used the speech to complain about how he has been treated by the media, a point Colbert found hard to stomach. “What better way to celebrate Black History Month than to have African Americans listen to a rich white guy complain that the world is unfair to him?” he said.
He joked about Trump’s anger over reports that he had tried to remove a bust of Martin Luther King Jr from the Oval Office, saying: “Trump didn’t take the statue from his office, it tried to escape.”
During the speech, Trump started to reel off a number of notable black figures and Colbert commented: “He’s just naming black people he’s heard of at this point: Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Fat Albert, the Pine Sol commercial lady, Robert Downey Jr in Tropic Thunder …”
