Few comedians have been having as much fun with this presidential election as the host of NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers.
Meyers’ sharply satirical examination of Trumpworld – A Closer Look – has established him, arguably with the exception of Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on Saturday Night Live, among the pre-eminent political late night satirists of 2016. And with a nightly audience of 1.5 million, he has found a distinctive political voice.
“When Trump came down the escalator to announce his candidacy we thought we’d get two weeks of material of it,” Meyers said this week before taping a new show partially devoted to Republican preoccupations with sex. “We thought he’d tease and get the kind of attention from saying he might run.
“But we never thought he’d go through with it.”
What started as material for comedy soon transformed into something else entirely.
“With each of [Trump’s] successes,” Meyers said, “there’s been a stock-taking of how different this felt from any election that’s come before it. It’s been a gift, but a gift that wears on you. Whenever we have a hiatus week, part of what makes it relaxing is to get away from this.”
On Friday, with 11 days to go, the campaign was thrown into turmoil by the latest turn in the drama over Hillary Clinton’s emails. That took the spotlight away from Trump – most likely, momentarily.
“I think he found an audience and then cultivated what that audience wanted,” Meyers said. “I think audience reaction is what he’s most concerned with.”
It’s the kind of observation a performer would make. “He has a very good antenna for it,” Meyers continued. “He loves playing the big room – those 20,000 seat arenas – and that’s why he can’t be bothered to show up to most interviews. He’d rather phone it in.”
Some have suggested that however much Trump protests that he wants to be president, in a sense he knows he is not the man for the job. He may be vain and thin-skinned, but that doesn’t quite account for the self-destructive fights he picks. Meyers believes the reality may be that Trump sees himself as a reluctant saviour.
“‘If only he’d run, he’d be the solution to all our problems’ is a lot more fun than actually having to solve those problems,” he said. “We haven’t shied away from using words like ‘racist’ and ‘liar’, but our theory is that this got out of hand for him.
“He didn’t think he’d get this far, but I think he knows he’d hate the job.”
Over the past 18 months, the conventional wisdom about what a candidate can or cannot do has been thoroughly overturned.
“We were told an outside candidate couldn’t upset the apple cart of what the GOP is,” Meyers said. “But with each outrage, people have said they’d leave, thinking other people would follow them, but no one did.”
Before he took the Late Night job two and a half years ago, as a speaker at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Meyers memorably asked whether Trump was planning to run as a Republican or as a joke.
That was in the midst of the Trump’s “birther campaign” against Barack Obama, and Obama had already made fun of the businessman. Footage clearly shows Trump sitting stony faced as he endures Meyers’ comedic attention. Some believe such ritualised humiliation steeled Trump to run.
“My worry was that the president had gone first and already told a lot of jokes about him and there would be audience exhaustion,” Meyers said. “Turned out people were happy to hear more jokes about him, but the first thing I heard when I stepped off the stage was to steer clear of him at the parties.”
The next day, Trump started criticising Meyers and his performance.
“When you talk about a gift,” Meyers said, “that’s the gift that keeps giving. He’s so transparent in his inability to take the high road and that’s the scariest thing about him – how deep-seated his resentments are.”
But has the rich seam of Trump comedic material let his opponent off lightly?
“It’s comical but it’s harder to explain,” Meyers says about Clinton’s emails, controversy over her family foundation and the WikiLeaks release of hacked Democratic party emails. “And we’ve tried.
“The bigger problem we have, though, is there have been so few days when what’s happening on the Clinton side has been a better story than what’s happening on the Trump side.
“We want to be fair, but we don’t feel that being fair is an equal number of jokes on each candidate. That’s a false equivalency. For us, it’s about chasing the best story for jokes and it’s rare that she’s a better joke than him.”
The now infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape in which Trump is heard to brag about his ability to kiss and touch women without their consent emerged from NBC. The network has not escaped accusations of political bias. But as Meyers pointed out in a segment to camera last week, many of the Republican party’s own problems appear to stem from living within a bubble of highly partisan media information.
In 10 days, after election day, the banquet of political comedy will have been consumed. Will Meyers feel bereft? Or over-indulged and suffering indigestion? Meyers recalls his time at Saturday Night Live, when the cool draft of post-election comedown could be felt ahead of the vote. In this cycle, however, it’s not clear what will come next.
“We didn’t know we wanted to take it here so I wouldn’t want to predict where we’d take it next,” he says. “Donald Trump seems to be saying he thinks the election will have a long tail.
“I don’t know if the first 100 days of the next presidency will be about the defeated candidate still making a lot of noise.”
