Late-night hosts have taken aim at the latest 24 hours in the Trump administration, focusing on the extended confirmation hearing for Neil Gorsuch and other problems.
On The Daily Show, Trevor Noah spent time discussing Gorsuch and the strangely informal way that many Republicans have been addressing him throughout the hearing, calling it “dicking about”.
“You know what this whole meeting reminded me of?” he said. “It reminded me of that scene in a heist movie when the criminals can’t believe they got away with the biggest theft of all time.”
He then played footage of Ted Cruz looking lovingly at Gorsuch. “Wow, I haven’t seen Ted Cruz that giddy since that one time he got a LinkedIn request,” he said.
He added: “That’s a man who’s reconsidering same-sex unions.”
On Full Frontal, Samantha Bee talked about the president’s disastrous run of bad decisions. “He’s been bombing harder than Mike Huckabee at an open mic night,” she said.
His healthcare bill and budget proposals have both gone down badly with Republicans, but Bee warned: “He’s got the might of the Russian army behind him.”
She also spoke about how the budget was an attempt to summarize Trump’s many speeches and beliefs to this point. “Distilling Trump’s spittle-flecked campaign jeremiads and incoherent revenge fantasies into policy isn’t an exact science, and if it were an exact science, this budget would defund it,” she said.
She also showed a graph that highlighted the large increase in proposed military spending compared to the much smaller budgets for other areas. “This kind of sounds like when an insecure guy tries to make his penis look bigger by shaving down everything else around it,” she said.
Budget director Mick Mulvaney also claimed that the proposal was no different to any family making cuts here and there. “Families routinely tweak their budgets by canceling their kids’ education, throwing out all their books and medicine, selling their smoke detectors and redirecting all their money to guns, ammo and a moat stocked with alligators,” Bee joked.
On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert spoke about Trump’s healthcare bill, which is still proving unpopular. “The bill has a pre-existing condition: everybody hates it,” he said.
He also referred to reports that Trump aides are still having to pacify him by showing positive news coverage when he is feeling attacked. “They treat the president the same way you treat a five-year-old throwing a tantrum,” he said.
On Late Night with Seth Meyers, the host played footage of Trump talking about Abraham Lincoln and stating that not many people are aware that he was also a Republican.
“This can only mean one thing: Trump just found out Lincoln was a Republican,” Meyers said. “Dude, the Republicans literally call it the party of Lincoln. Did you think they were talking about the car?”
He also spoke about the need for Trump to make a public apology over his false claim that Obama ordered a wiretap on him. “It doesn’t hurt a normal person to say sorry, but it might kill Trump,” he said. “I don’t even think his mouth can make those words.”
There’s also been a fresh set of accusations against Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his ties with Russia, but White House press secretary Sean Spicer has now claimed he had a very limited role within the party. “To be fair, I’m pretty sure everyone involved in the Trump campaign played a limited role, kind of like Trump is doing now with the presidency,” he said.
