Seth Meyers has ridiculed President Donald Trump after his “unhinged” announcement of a crackdown on crime in Washington D.C.
Trump revealed plans to deploy 800 National Guard troops to Washington and temporarily taking over the city's police department, claiming D.C. had been “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals”.
But Meyers, and others, have been quick to point out that reality does not necessarily support Trump’s apocalyptic vision of the city.
“You can see how detatched from reality this press conference was in the way Trump talked about D.C. like it was a dystopian hellhole in a steampunk novel,” Meyers said, describing it as “unhinged”. “So clearly what happened was he fell asleep watching Fox News, rolled over on the remote, accidentally changed the channel to HBO, woke up, saw ‘Mad Max - Fury Road’ - thought it was still the news,” he added.
Critics, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have pointed out that crime statistics suggest lawlessness in D.C. is actually down. “Violent crime in D.C. is at a 30-year low,” questioning the president’s brash orders,” Clinton wrote on X Monday.
Meyers said the takeover announcement as the latest in a series of statements where Trump tries to use numbers to back up his policies.
“One thing is obvious about Trump, numbers are not his strong suit,” the Late Show host told viewers before talking about the president’s previous announcements on tariffs. Meyers said Trump reeled off a string of “seemingly random figures that made no sense” when he first announced the levies, and “sounded like an auctioneer with a concussion”.
The talk show host then said Trump had peddled statistics that were “mathematically impossible,” before playing a series of clips of the president talking about wanting to cut drug prices by “1,000 per cent, 600 per cent, 500 per cent, 1,500 per cent.”
“Trump should be fact-checked every time he talks about numbers,” Meyers added.
Protesters took to the streets of D.C. Monday to express their anger over the president’s orders.
“Crime is down. They’re distracting us,” one demonstrator told NBC4 Washington.
Another said she felt “really terrified” about the prospect of deploying nearly 800 National Guard troops in DC, adding that she feared the same would happen in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
