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      John Oliver on the US election: ‘Despair doesn’t help anything’

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      “It has been a rough week,” said John Oliver on Sunday evening, days after the majority of American voters elected Donald Trump to a second term as president, “which is, to put it mildly, not what I was personally hoping would happen. And honestly, in Trump’s victory speech, he couldn’t seem to believe it either.”Oliver played a clip from Trump’s characteristically rambling victory speech, in which he boasted: “We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible, and it is now clear that we’ve achieved the most incredible political thing … Look what happened. Is this crazy?”“Yeah, it is crazy,” Oliver answered. “It’s really fucking crazy. He’s basically one sentence away from saying, ‘I mean, you guys saw what I did, right? And you still voted for this. That doesn’t make any sense.’“I know being a shambling verbal mess is part of Trump’s brand,” he added, “but it is still incredible to see an incoming president ad-lib a victory speech with the same energy as the best man who didn’t realize he had to give a toast.”Oliver then looked into the blame game entertained by those disappointed by Kamala Harris’s loss. “People are pointing the finger in all directions, from Latino voters to young men to Joe Rogan,” he said. “You can basically play your own ‘wheel of blame’ and generally make sure it lands on whoever you were mad at in the first place. And I’ll be honest, I get the appeal. It is fun to blame people. Trump was literally just elected president again on a platform of doing exactly that.”Oliver jokingly blamed the election on Katy Perry, citing her performance at Harris’s final rally on the eve of election day, where she covered Whitney Houston’s 1986 classic The Greatest Love of All.“Why would you try to cover Whitney Houston?!” he exclaimed, referring to the rendition as a “drunk bachelorette karaoke night performance”.Others have attributed Trump’s victory to inflation and frustration with the cost of living, even as macro indicators point to a strong economy. “It is not news that Trump’s overt white supremacy and misogyny appeal to many of his voters,” said Oliver. “It’s also not news that many like to hide that by claiming all they’re really worried about is the economy. But clearly for others, there is a willful denial going on about him. Because Trump lies so constantly, people have a sense that you can pick and choose what things he actually believes and create a version of him that suits you. And that can be the case even when his intentions are very clear.”The host then looked ahead to Trump’s second term, starting with a chart of potential Trump administration appointees that “looks like a choose your fighter screen where the only thing they’re fighting is the arc of the moral universe. It looks like an advent calendar where every circle opens up to a tiny piece of literal shit. It looks like a game board for Guess Who? Oops, all assholes.“If you are watching this right now and thinking, ‘You know what, I’m not actually ready for this either,’ I totally get it,” he said. “It is understandable not to want yet another guy in a suit doom-squawking at you. So if you are too angry, depressed or worried to watch the rest of this show, no problem. I have been in each of those places this week, and they are all a correct reaction because, look, we did a show like this after the election in 2016 when no one expected Trump to win.“This time, though, his winning felt like a real possibility all year long, lots of people mobilized to stop it, but it happened anyway, which feels somehow worse,” he continued.Trump will be sworn back into office on 20 January, and “that is very depressing”, said Oliver. “So what do the rest of us do next? Well, for the next few days, I’d say whatever you want. I am not gonna judge you for how you get through the next week.“There is no right reaction right now,” he added. “Lots of us are grieving and grief has stages. We take different amounts of time for different people. The stage I’m currently locked in is anger. I am mad for trans people who’ve been threatened. I’m disgusted at the prospect of mass deportation. I’m furious at Biden for not dropping out earlier, and that the egos and inaction of two men older than credit cards themselves have led us to this point. I’m mad that women have to hear ‘your body, my choice’ from rightwing dipshits.“I’m mad that Elon Musk is apparently sitting in on meetings with the president of Ukraine,” he continued. “I’m mad about the myriad of damage Trump will do that cannot easily be undone, like setting back efforts to fight climate change and appointing more supreme court justices. And I’m mad at the prospect of four more years of people saying, ‘So is your job like so much easier with Trump as president?’ No, it is not! No, it fucking isn’t! Fuck you so much!“So whether you’re angry right now, or despairing, or Googling ‘new country no fascists how move’, do what you’ve gotta do. But try not to completely obliterate yourself in despair,” he concluded. “Despair doesn’t help anything. If anything, it makes things worse.” Oliver did not encourage false hope, but instead counting the small victories to avoid burning out – such as Delaware’s election of the first openly trans member to the US House, or the rollback of abortion bans in several states and indicators that “Democratic policies are still popular even in a year that their candidate wasn’t”.“You might well be exhausted, confused, scared and running on fucking fumes right now,” he added. “Which is fucking understandable, but you might be surprised just how far you can still get even on fumes.” More

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      If I were Captain America, I’d quit | Stewart Lee

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      The presidency of Donald Trump contaminates everything that touches it, like dogshit on the end of a pointed stick. Be careful, politicians of the world, entertainment brands, and commercial properties, that you don’t get any on you. It stinks.On Monday night, one of my lovely rescue cats, having battled the cat flap into submission, disappeared in the stupid firework dark. He’s not back yet and I am very sad. Like me, he was abandoned to his fate as a child, but in a cardboard box outside the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ place rather than in the Children’s Society offices in Lichfield (a town from which I have been banned from performing by the mayor’s office since 1990). Dependent, like me, on the kindness of a chain of strangers, the cat’s arrival and survival felt like a small balancing of the book of life. But maybe, like many millions of us worldwide, he just couldn’t face Wednesday morning.Last week, Robert Jenrick, our new shadow justice secretary, was trying to blame Keir Starmer for the early release of sex offenders from the very prisons his own government had carelessly overcrowded; another mess left for someone else to pick up. The Tories spent 14 years treating the whole country like a teenager’s bedroom. I only went in to gather up all the old coffee cups, and ended up tripping over a series of abandoned infrastructure projects and falling into a vast network of sewage-filled waterways.But, one has to ask, if Jenrick’s so worried about sex offenders being on the loose, why is he so pleased that one is now in the White House? “If I were an American citizen, I would be voting for Donald Trump”, the child-hating sod told GB News’s calcified opinion-vampire Camilla Tominey, Britain’s 49th most influential rightwing figure, in September. It looks like it’s one rule for white working class British rapists and quite another for orange American billionaire sex offenders with their fingers on the nuclear codes. Two-tier Jenrick can do one! Accommodating Donald Trump will invalidate us all.This week, Bob Dylan is at the Royal Albert Hall. I couldn’t buy a ticket, and wasn’t about to pay five times over the odds to one of the Tories’ ticket criminals. But I may go down to Kensington and hang around outside hopefully, like a dog, in case another middle-aged man with an opinion about the relative merits of the five extant takes of She’s Your Lover Now wants to sell a sudden spare to “the world’s greatest living standup comedian” (the Times).I would like to see Bob Dylan one more time, at least, but wonder what it would feel like to watch one of the architects of postwar progressive America performing in a world where the culture he helped create is so obviously in retreat, as a sexual abuser reclines in Washington inflating himself like a bulbous brown toad. One thing you can say about Dylan, who rarely offers the casual fan the opportunity to enjoy any of his back catalogue live without a significant ontological struggle, is that he was never a nostalgia act. Well, he is now. Trump has moved the dial and made him into one. The times they are a-changing. But not in a good way.Since the second world war, America’s most powerful tool has been the soft global diplomacy of its irresistible, and broadly liberal, popular culture – rock’n’ roll, cinema, and latterly the comic-book characters that are now the tentpoles of the international entertainment industry. But how do those American icons make sense in a Trumpian world, where the star-spangled iconography that informs their costumes is now redolent of fascism and climate denialism rather than freedom and the future? Nobody would want their child to be saved from a burning building by Swastika-Chest Man and his kid sidekick Drill Baby.Because working-class Jewish autodidact visionaries, producing the pop art primers of tomorrow on a pittance, drew Captain America punching out Hitler in the early 40s, and because formerly one-dimensional superheroes were made thrillingly two-dimensional by acid-fried college dropout creatives in the 60s and 70s, Marvel Comics, though their roots are obscured, remain broadly liberal, even almost countercultural. That’s how I reverse-engineer my infantilised pseudo-intellectual desire to keep reading them at the age of 56, anyway.Indeed, in September 1963, Jack Kirby, the 12-cent William Blake of the Lower East Side, drew the Fantastic Four fighting the Hate-Monger, a villain whose superpowers were not the ability to control soil or infuriate moles, but the ability to whip up hate. “We must drive all the foreigners back where they came from. We must show no mercy to those we hate,” he cries, in his purple hood, as his followers agree – “Long live the Hate-Monger. He’ll clean up this country for us!” – and the Invisible Girl observes, helpfully: “He seems to have the crowd in a trance. They … they’re agreeing with his un-American sentiments.” Hang on! Was that Fantastic Four Issue 21, 61 years ago, or Sky News last week?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionScarlett Johansson, Marvel’s Black Widow, pointlessly assembled a squadron of Avengers actors to denounce Trump, arguably emphasising America’s divides, but the real Avengers would oppose Trump. If they existed. In 1974, as Watergate’s curtain fell on Nixon, the comics writer Steve Englehart, a former soldier who became a conscientious objector, had Captain America abandon his costume and take on the identity of Nomad (“the man without a country”) because he couldn’t square the fictional character’s values with his country’s corrupt figurehead. My Captain America would not sling his vibranium shield for Donald Trump. The success of Trump invalidates the shared, if naive, notion of what America is. I’m going to look for my cat.Stewart Lee’s 2025 tour Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulfbegins at London’s Leicester Square theatre this December, with a July Royal Festival Hall run just announced.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk More

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      ‘People feel terrible. They want to laugh’: can comedy make light of Trump 2.0?

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      “When Trump first won, there was almost a novelty to having a character such as him in a position of such vast responsibility – that was a new thing for comedy to address,” said Andy Zaltzman, chair of Radio 4’s The News Quiz and the satirist behind The Bugle podcast and multiple political comedies.The first Trump presidency spawned debate about whether it’s possible to satirise a man whose extreme appearance and rhetoric mean he presents as a walking caricature. The New York Times even ran a piece titled “How President Trump ruined political comedy”.Now comedians in the UK and US are trying to work out how to deal with a second, possibly darker, Trump presidency.“Trump is so ridiculous that he makes comic extrapolation harder,” said Chicago-born, London-based standup Sara Barron, who found much of the comedy targeting Trump “did not provide catharsis”.Zaltzman has just embarked on a tour and, post-election, is writing new jokes exploring the global implications. Trump’s absurdity means there are obvious punchlines, “but it can be harder to get to the heart of the issue”, Zaltzman said.“Comedy is so ubiquitous – anything that happens, there’ll be a thousand memes and TikToks. The challenge is finding an original angle. That’s always been difficult with Trump.”View image in fullscreenPreviously, Zaltzman’s solution was presenting Trump’s brain (a cauliflower) on stage, using chopped-up Trump speeches to make it “speak” about Australian cricketers: “I figured no one else would be taking that angle.”In the run-up to election day, Barron found a personal angle. Coincidentally, her career thrived under Trump’s last tenure, so she made a sketch satirising the instinct of many to think: “This terrible thing is happening, but here’s why it’s OK for me!”Fellow US-born, UK-based standup Janine Harouni isn’t happy that Trump is back but said: “It’s a gift for comedy because people are feeling terrible and they want to laugh.” During Trump’s first term, Harouni produced Stand Up With Janine Harouni (Please Remain Seated), in which she explored the political distance between her left-leaning self and her Trump-supporting father.“I wrote that show because I love my dad and cannot reconcile his political beliefs with how I feel about him personally. My father is also an Arab, son of immigrants, so I was really struggling with that,” Harouni said.She approached this via comedy because it felt so thorny. “Comedy is a release of worry and fear. If you can find a way to laugh at something that upset you, it doesn’t have control any more,” Harouni said. “I wanted it to feel healing and hopeful.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBarron witnessed that power while performing on election results day – a reminder that comedians can “give people some kind of respite”, she said. “It was an electric gig. Everyone was so happy to be with like-minded people.”Catharsis is a driving force of political comedy, said Zaltzman: “It gives people a chance to laugh at serious news, which is valuable.” It can also challenge authority. “It absolutely has to hold power to account,” said Lewis MacLeod, the voice of Trump on Dead Ringers. “It becomes its own protest, but it’s done with laughs.”MacLeod perfected his Trump impression for the latest series by studying recent interviews. “Listening to him on Joe Rogan was a gift for any mimic. It was uninterrupted; he wasn’t arguing,” he said. “He’s a little bit older, more reflective. There’s this messianic tone.”MacLeod has also started caricaturing Elon Musk, who is likely to play a role in Trump’s administration. “There’s something of a mad, maniacal robot about him,” MacLeod said. There’s the danger of creating satirical impressions that are too likable: “That’s the rub of satire and mimicry.”With Trump’s increased support this time, Zaltzman questions the power of comedy to change minds but said: “The best comedy has elements of creativity and optimism, offering alternative ideas, hopefully that will emerge.”Harouni said, from her experience with her Trump-voting family, there’s reason to feel hopeful: “Not everyone who voted for Trump holds his worst beliefs.” She hopes the political comedy of the next four years considers that. “I like comedy that unites people from different systems of belief,” she said. “I hope people strive for that rather than continue to feed into the divisive narrative that’s driving Americans further apart.” More

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      ‘Fascism comes not with goose-steps but dance moves’: European writers react to Trump’s win

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      Ece Temelkuran: ‘Some, who you assume to be your people, will normalise Trump’Dear American friend,By the time my letter reaches you, you’ll have heard all the clever ways of saying, “We are fucked!” Thousands of soundbites will have told you, “Get up and fight.” Others will have shared tips on mourning and healing. The strange thing is that even though you’ll be in the same dark circus of emotions, everything you hear from your political side will add to your anger. That is what defeat the second time around does: the shame of losing morphs into self-hatred. You begin to be enraged by your ilk more than the opponent. That is why I am writing directly to you. Because in the coming months, your emotional state will impact domestic and global politics.View image in fullscreenSure, you remember. In 2016, when you were in a similar state of rage and depression, the collective consolation was political humour and the idea that Trump would quickly crash and burn. This time around, whenever he comes up with an outrageous idea or promises some other lunacy, you’ll again see people saying, “No, he wouldn’t do that.” Because when people feel helpless, they soothe themselves with wishful thinking. This was what we witnessed in my home country of Turkey, as well as Italy, India, and all the other countries that have been down the same road.Yet, the new chapter will come with an additional surprise: you will experience the magnetic magic of power. Some, who you assume to be your people, will decide tonormalise Trump and find ways to make themselves at home with the insanity. Hopefully, it won’t happen, but just in case, prepare yourself for the most painful bit. The absolute desperation when you witness some friends, first hesitantly murmuring, then confidently saying, “It is not as bad as we imagined.” You will watch in horror as they fall in line without being forced.Then, you’ll notice that the new morality created in the White House trickles down to the people. The fundamental moral values you assumed were non-negotiable will be debated shamelessly. They will not right away cancel women’s rights, but they will begin to float questions about those rights. They will not destroy the rule of law tomorrow afternoon, but you’ll hear Trump’s pundits say how courts are slowing down the process of “making America great again”. Trump will not walk into the White House with military boots, but here and there, you’ll see more police violence on campuses and hear people saying, “Well, the protesters were crossing the line anyway.” The political debate will be turned into such a mess that you’ll forget that in the 21st century, fascism comes to power not with goose steps but through elaborate dance moves.Meanwhile, in about one or two years, you will have shouted “No” so often and against so many things that you will be exhausted. Many will ask again, “So, where is hope?” However, you’ll realise that this time, it is not hope but something more essential that is lost: faith – in politics and your people. And that is the loss that will turn you into a neutral element, a zero in the political equation.So, this is a friendly warning to stop the emotional spiralling in its early stages. Try to put self-sabotaging emotions in the freezer for four years. Your job is not to have quarrels with Trump supporters now or get pissed off with your side. If I may, your job is to replace your anger with attention. Trump surely will drive you crazy every day with new outlandish stuff, but that is only showmanship. The dangerous bit happens through the change in the institutions. Keep your eye on the institutions.It is not as thrilling as the blame game on your own side, but it is essential to keep it together so you can tell the Democratic party to get serious. Tell them that Trump is the strange fruit of the political system, not a deviation. To change the broken system, Democrats must consider how to achieve equality, dignity and justice for all. They must restore trust in politics and cure the nihilism and cynicism that had taken overlong before Trump came on to the scene.And please, this time around, don’t assume that what happened in all those “crazy countries” won’t happen to you. Because, for us, it started just like this. How To Lose A Country: The Seven Steps From Democracy to Fascism by Ece Temelkuran is out now published by Canongate.Joseph O’Connor: ‘He might see it as a badge of honour to be dissed by liberal countries’View image in fullscreenCaptain Punchdown returns. The man who once publicly mocked a disabled reporter. And it’s no more Mister Nice Guy. Political thugs all over the world will be emboldened. The anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol will be memorable. He’ll probably make it a national holiday.I think it will mean the end of the Democratic party in its current demonstrably unelectable form, and that will be no bad thing, although the splits will be painful. It will also pour concrete on the grave of the McCain-era Republican party. Far from making America great, Trump Redux will see the United States become a further-divided nation that is increasingly misunderstood and disliked around the world. Probably he doesn’t care; he might see it as a badge of honour to be dissed by countries where they have liberal fripperies like a social welfare system. But the isolationism will isolate. It’s sad.The return of the wall-builder-in-chief is extraordinarily damaging to the valuable and honourable idea that electoral politics is a profession best begun with an apprenticeship of service. The victory of a four-times criminally indicted, twice impeached felon will encourage a particular type of newcoming extremist. That’s what’s most worrying. His cabinet will look like the cantina in Star Wars.It will set back the progress on climate change by a decade we don’t have to spare. Women will be looked after, ‘whether they like it or not’. The suffering of the Palestinian people will worsen, if such a thing may be imagined. Immigrants and asylum seekers will be targets for even viler abuse. It is hard to see how his promise to deport 15 million people could be carried out, but it seems likely that mass expulsion at gunpoint will become an everyday reality in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Families will be separated. More children will spend time in cages.Here in Dublin, where I live, the news has been greeted with gloomy resignation in government circles and with much practice of the ancient art of putting on a brave face. The relationship between Ireland and the United States is old and close, but there are concerns that Trump’s planned tariff war and tax changes will rock the Irish economy. Irish membership of the EU is valued deeply by most of our people; there’s a sense that pro-European sentiment will be regarded as a shootable offence in the White House and that the affection of recent American presidents for Irish culture will, for a variety of reasons, not be continuing. Seamus Heaney may not be quoted quite so often, let us say.In essence, Putting America First means seeing everywhere else as an inconvenience. The Irish know a bit about what that feels like. His rhetoric about immigrants could come straight from the ugly pages of Punch magazine in the 1850s, in which refugees to England from the Irish famine are portrayed as apes and murderers, bringers of terrorism and disease.Once, during the campaign, he made me laugh. Onstage at a rally, wearing a truck driver’s fluorescent safety vest, he quipped that it made him look thin. But most things he said ranged from disconcerting to truly terrifying. Presumably, that’s what they wanted, the millions of decent, betrayed Americans who voted for him: a guy who doesn’t play by the rules. Be careful what you wish for. The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor will be published by Penguin in January.Andrey Kurkov: ‘Without American aid, Ukraine may find itself in a hopeless situation’View image in fullscreenTrump’s victory in the US presidential election initially silenced Ukraine. Only weapons – all along the more than 500 miles of the front line – continued to roar, while Russian missiles and drones made ever fiercer attacks against Ukrainian cities and villages.In silence, Ukrainians mourned the loss of one more shield of hope. Pre-election commentaries from journalists and political scientists, and the speeches of Trump himself, had made it very clear that Trump in the White House would mean greatly reduced military aid to Ukraine and that this would force President Zelenskyy to sit down at the negotiating table with Vladimir Putin.The outcome of such negotiations is easy to predict. Russia continues to demand that the Ukrainian leadership “recognise reality”. This is shorthand for saying that Ukraine must give up to Russia the territories which have been captured and occupied, and also the areas of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions which are currently free. These free territories are huge and include two major cities: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.But today the shock wave has passed. People are beginning to share their dark visions of the future. In his video address about the US election, Zelenskyy tried to calm Ukrainians, assuring them that he and Donald Trump had established cordial relations and that, during a personal meeting in September, Donald Trump heard everything that Volodymyr Zelenskyy wished to tell him.Ukrainians are waiting for Trump himself to address them, as Biden did on his visit to Ukraine. Ukrainians need to hear Trump promise not to abandon them to their fate. Few believe the president-elect will make any such promise. It is not in his character or on his agenda. Neither will Zelenskyy be pushed into unfavourable, not to say dangerous, negotiations with Putin. There will most likely be a reduction in military and financial aid.The “Ukrainian problem” will be handed over to the European Union as the leaders, and some of them have already taken up the baton. Trump’s victory in the presidential election will force the EU to focus on its own military doctrine and a common defence policy. European military aid to Ukraine will continue, but, as before, it will be delivered haltingly, preventing Ukraine from planning ahead in general, let alone planning for a counteroffensive.Ultimately, without American aid, Ukraine may find itself in a hopeless situation, and then unfavourable negotiations with Russia may become inevitable. This in turn will lead to more migration from Ukraine, especially of young people.The silence has been broken, but Ukrainians are still only murmuring their disappointment. The discussions on social media are muted. In the US, the majorityof the older generation of the Ukrainian diaspora voted for Donald Trump, but this is not discussed here either. Ukrainians who know about it keep quiet, understanding that this sector of the US population, just like most post-Soviet US citizens, want a “firm hand” in politics and in the economy. And in this they are somewhat similar to today’s citizens of the Russian federation. More

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      Jimmy Kimmel feuds with Elon Musk: ‘At least my children like me’

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      Late-night hosts talk Elon Musk calling Jimmy Kimmel a “propaganda puppet”, how Democrats move forward and bankruptcy court for TGI Fridays.Jimmy KimmelJimmy Kimmel continued to process the election results on Thursday evening. “The crazy thing is, there are still two months before our long national nightmare even begins,” he said of Donald Trump’s victory. “It’s like we’re standing in the middle of the road waiting for a bus to hit us, but it’s still 40 miles away.”Kimmel then took aim at Trump’s richest ally, Musk, who posted on X, formerly Twitter until he bought it, that Kimmel was “an insufferable nonsense propaganda puppet”.“At least my children like me,” Kimmel retorted. “The guy who paid people $1m a day to vote for Donald Trump is calling me a propaganda puppet? Listen Kermit, you bought Twitter. You bought a social media platform that is literally a propaganda machine.“Let me tell you something,” he continued. “If I spent four weeks trying to come up with a description of Elon Musk, I don’t think I could do better than ‘insufferable nonsense propaganda puppet’.”Kimmel reminded viewers of what Trump used to say about Musk before the Tesla CEO gave him $100m. In June 2022, he posted on Truth Social about meeting with Musk, bragging: “I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg’ and he would have done it … ”“And you know what he means by beg, right?” Kimmel laughed. “I’m sure you guys will be great together now that you’re friends. I’m sure his little hand will fit nicely in your sockhole.”Seth MeyersOn Late Night, Seth Meyers lamented how the justice department is reportedly wrapping up its legal cases against Trump in wake of his second term as president. “We have a stupid system that’s basically makes getting elected president a get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said. “They’re going to have to add one to Monopoly that says ‘Run for president, win, collect $200’ and then a second card that says ‘Unless your name is Rudy Giuliani, then you’re still broke and disbarred and weird.’“So Trump’s about to skate and Republicans are demanding peace, meanwhile Democrats have descended into recriminations and finger-pointing,” he said before several clips of Democratic pundits blaming the “far left” for Kamala Harris’s defeat.“You think Kamala Harris was too far left? She campaigned with Liz Cheney!” Meyers countered. “The only way she could’ve run a more mainstream, centrist campaign was if she formed a Huey Lewis cover band with Mitt Romney and did a cameo on Law & Order. I mean, she praised Dick Cheney, for crying out loud!“It’s not an issue of left versus far left,” he later added. “You just have to make people’s lives better in a way that’s direct and easy to understand and then aggressively take credit for it.“There are lessons Democrats can take away from this election, and if they implement those lessons quickly, a lot can change,” he concluded.Stephen ColbertAnd on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert mourned a different type of loss: the potential end of TGI Fridays, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week. “But if there are no more TGI Fridays, what are we going to thank God for now?” he joked. “I don’t understand – Wednesday? We’re too busy humping! God doesn’t want to see that.”According to Fortune, the restaurant chain is worried it won’t have enough cash if customers redeem the $50m in outstanding gift cards that don’t expire. “So the greatest threat TGI Fridays is facing is that someday, it might occur to people to dine there,” Colbert laughed. “So that $50m in gift cards may soon be worthless, but don’t worry you can always use them at TGI Fridays sister restaurant: Aah, It’s Monday.”In more serious news, “we still don’t know the entire parade of clowns, degenerates and in-laws that Trump will have running this country,” said Colbert, but it’s likely one will be former presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr. The Kennedy scion made headlines throughout his campaign for “doing a whole bunch of crazy stuff”, including but not limited to: dumping a dead bear in Central Park as a prank, living with an emu that would regularly attack his wife, owning two ravens who would “meditate” with him, bragging about his freezer full of roadkill meat, and beheading a whale and then strapping it to the roof of his minivan for a five-hour drive home.“Now, that sounds deranged,” said Colbert, “but he actually has a good reason for all of this: a worm got into his brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” (That’s yet another reported Kennedy story.)“So, naturally, this whale-decapitating, bear-dumping, walking, talking worm cemetery is who Donald Trump wants to put in charge of our nation’s health,” Colbert lamented. More

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      Stephen Colbert on Trump’s win: ‘The deep shock and sense of loss is enormous’

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      Late-night hosts discussed Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, sending him back to the White House.Stephen ColbertStephen Colbert didn’t mince words on the results of the 2024 election: “Well, fuck. It happened, again,” he said. “After a bizarre and vicious campaign fueled by a desperate need not to go to jail, Donald Trump has won the 2024 election.“The deep shock and sense of loss is enormous,” he continued. “But let’s look at the bright side. This way at least there’ll be a peaceful transfer of power. Mike Pence, olly olly oxen free. All day yesterday, I was walking around proudly wearing my ‘I Voted’ sticker. Today I wore my, ‘I am questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of humanity’ sticker.“Now as a late-night host, people often say to me, ‘Come on, part of you has gotta want Trump to win because he gives you so much material to work with,’” he added. “No. No one tells the guy who cleans the bathroom, ‘Wow, you must love it when someone has explosive diarrhea, there’s so much material for you to work with!’“I wish, you wish, so many of us wish this hadn’t happened,” he continued, “but that is not for any of us to decide. This is a democracy. That’s Democracy with a capital ‘duh’. And in this democracy, the majority has spoken, and they said they don’t actually care that much about democracy.”The Late Show host congratulated Harris and Tim Walz on running an “extraordinary” 107-day campaign, and looked to the bleak future. “The first time Donald Trump was elected, he started as a joke and ended as a tragedy. This time he starts as a tragedy. Who knows what he’ll end as – a limerick?“Who knows what the next four years are going to be like,” he added. “What we do know is that we are going to be governed by a monstrous child surrounded by cowards and grifters, and my brain keeps pumping out an unlimited supply of ramifications. It’s really hard to see a bright side here.”But “we can take comfort in knowing that we’ve been here before. We know what’s coming,” he concluded. And there would be jokes, “because that’s what we do. And I’ll let you in on a little secret. No one gets into this business because everything in their life worked out great, so were built for rough roads. You guys ready?”Jimmy Kimmel“Let me tell you, that was the worst Taco Tuesday of my whole life,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday evening. “We had the choice between a prosecutor and a criminal and we chose the criminal to be president of the United States. More than half of this country voted for the criminal who’s planning to pardon himself for his crimes. I guess this election wasn’t rigged.”Fighting back tears, Kimmel listed everyone that Trump’s election will hurt: “It was a terrible night for women, for children, for the hundreds of thousands of hard-working immigrants who make this country go, for healthcare, for our climate, for scientists, for journalists, for justice, for free speech. It was a terrible night for poor people, for the middle class, for seniors who rely on social security, for our allies in Ukraine, for Nato and democracy and decency. It was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him and guess what? It was a bad night for everyone who voted for him, too. You just don’t realize it yet.”It was a good night, however, for Putin, polio and “lovable billionaires like Elon Musk and the bros up in Silicon Valley and all the wriggling brain worms who sold what was left of their souls to bow down to Donald Trump”.“But I’m gonna say something that Trump would never say unless it favored him,” he added. “The people voted and this is the choice we made. In January, Donald Trump becomes president and that’s that, he won. It doesn’t mean we give up, but it also doesn’t mean we storm the Capitol because we don’t like the result.”Despite a lot of people not wanting to hear any silver lining, Kimmel endeavored to end on a positive note. “The best I can come up with is, we’ve been through this once before and yes, this time it is probably going to be worse, maybe a lot worse, but I also think that maybe we will look back and realize that in the long run, this is what we needed to wake us up,” he concluded. “Maybe the people who care so much about him need to find out how little he cares about them.”Seth MeyersAnd on Late Night, Seth Meyers also mourned Trump’s victory, noting that he will be the oldest person to ever take office and the first convicted felon. “When I was in grade school, they always told us anyone could grow up to be president, but they didn’t say ‘literally fucking anyone’,” he joked.“I wish I had some trenchant words of wisdom to impart,” he later added. “I’m sad to say I don’t. We’re about to step over the precipice into truly uncharted territory. You need only look back to Trump’s first term to get a sense of how dangerous his second term will be. And no one can say they didn’t know what they were getting, because Trump made it crystal clear. All I know is that the fight for justice doesn’t end with one election.“In times like this, when everything feels overwhelming and impossible, like all hope is lost, we have no choice but to look back on the broad scope of history,” he continued. “Justice is not automatic, comeuppance is not guaranteed, politics unfortunately is not a Marvel movie, even though Joe Biden does look eerily like old Captain America. That doesn’t mean a struggle toward a more just and compassionate world is futile, it just means it’s hard, and heartbreaking and soul-crushing and agonizing. And it never ends. Democracy does not happen only on election day.”Meyers ended with an exhortation to his viewers to keep fighting back: “If you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who said no to Trump’s dark, dangerous vision for America last night, now is the time to stand in solidarity with our friends, with our neighbors, with the vulnerable communities, and begin the hard work of making real the world we want to live in. That’s what we will be doing on day one.” More

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      Jimmy Kimmel on US election: ‘It feels like the country is waiting to get results of a biopsy’

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      On the eve of election day, late-night hosts talked polls, the exhaustion of an endless campaign cycle and their closing arguments for Kamala Harris.Jimmy Kimmel“We are now one day away from having to wait another week to find out who won the election,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Monday evening. “It feels like the whole country is waiting to get the results of a biopsy.”Donald Trump declared his candidacy nearly two years ago, on 15 November 2022. “And now, 720 days, 88 criminal charges, 34 felony convictions, four indictments, two Democratic opponents and one garbage truck later, here we are. Election day,” said Kimmel.According to most national polls, the race is a dead heat, but Kimmel had harsh words for the pollsters. “These polls? They’re mood rings. That’s all they are,” he said. “They bring you up, they bring you down. Poll is short for bipolar.“There’s no magic involved, it’s heads or tails,” he added. “At the end of this, the pollsters who were wrong will quietly disappear. The other ones will be like ‘I told you, 1%.’ What did you tell us? You called 800 losers who didn’t have enough sense to not answer an unknown call.“I still don’t understand how this race is close,” he continued, referencing recordings obtained by the Daily Beast of Jeffrey Epstein talking about Trump as his “friend”.“Epstein said Trump told him he likes to have sex with the wives of his best friends, to the point where Epstein described Trump as having no ‘moral compass’. Do you know what kind of lowlife you have to be for Jeffrey Epstein to say you have no moral compass?” he fumed. “It’s like if R Kelly got mad at you for leaving the toilet seat up.”Kimmel concluded with his final message regarding the election: “Take a moment to imagine a world in which you wake up in the morning, you check the news, and no one says the words ‘Donald’ or ‘Trump’. Just a bunch of normal, boring stuff. Wouldn’t that be nice? No lawn signs. No red hats. No arguing with your grandfather.“Let’s remove this cancerous polyp from our collective national colon,” he added, “and move on already.”Seth Meyers“None of us can control what happens tomorrow, we can only control how drunk we are when it happens,” said Seth Meyers on Late Night, staring down a batch of polls declaring the election a “toss-up”.“How can so many polls be tied?” he wondered. “Are they doing the first half of the poll at an artisanal coffee shop in Williamsburg and the second half of the poll in a beer line at a Kid Rock concert?“How is it possible that exactly half the country think Trump is an amoral psychopath who would wreck American democracy, and the other half thinks he’s an amoral psychopath who would wreck American democracy … but it’s worth it because he’s an incredible dancer!”Meyers devoted a good chunk of his monologue to reminding voters what they were choosing between. Republicans’ closing message, he argued, was: “Are you going to vote for a woman whose laugh they don’t like, or are you going to vote for a guy who fomented a violent coup attempt after a months-long campaign against the 2020 election, undercut the nation’s response to a deadly pandemic that spiraled out of control because he tried to cover it up, lied about its severity, promoted sham treatments for it, said we could cure it by injecting disinfectant and shining powerful lights inside the body, became the first president since Herbert Hoover to oversee a net job loss?”He listed more disqualifying credentials up to and including January 6 – full transcript here – and concluded with a note of exhaustion. “I’ve been talking about this man for nearly a decade now, as evidenced by the fact that everything I just listed is in my brain still somehow,” he said. “The symptoms that gave rise to him will not immediately go away if he loses tomorrow, but we do have an opportunity to say as a nation that we want him to go away. And I really hope that happens, mainly so I never have to think about this ever again.”Stephen Colbert“After a two-year campaign, we have finally made it through all 20 years,” said Stephen Colbert on Late Night. “We’re all in some true sense about to witness history. Good or bad. I’m guessing this is how the people of Pompeii felt when Vesuvius was trying to get re-elected.”Like Meyers and Kimmel, Colbert was frustrated by the dead-heat polls. “I could get a clearer prediction from a magic 8 ball!” he joked.One ray of light, however, was J Ann Selzer’s highly regarded Des Moines Register poll in Iowa, which found Harris leading Trump by three points, with senior women breaking for the vice-president 63% to 28%. “Oh, senior women are AAR-pissed,” Colbert quipped. “Save me, Gam-Gam!”The Harris campaign cautioned about getting too excited, but “too late!” Colbert chirped. “I have to be excited, because I’ve only got two other choices. Absolute terror or Absolut vodka. I need this. There’s no in between.”Meanwhile, in the final days of the campaign, Trump was “presenting a very good case that his brain done broke”, Colbert quipped. In North Carolina, Trump tried to “out-Tim Walz Tim Walz” with a football pep talk that went awry. “All we have to do is carry that ball over that … thing,” he said.“Oh yes, exactly,” Colbert joked. “Just carry the ball over that … thing.” More

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      John Oliver on Trump’s businesses: ‘Always operating at maximum greed’

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      On the final episode of Last Week Tonight before the 2024 election, John Oliver provided one final reason not to vote for Donald Trump: his many dubious businesses, which could guide his actions if elected president again. “We’ve talked all year about the many good reasons not to vote for him: his mass deportation plans, his shaping of the courts, Project 2025, everything he said or did before his presidency, everything he said or did during his presidency, everything he said or did after his presidency and the fact that it should be unconstitutional to have a vice-president named JD,” said Oliver.But when it comes to making money as a former president, “Trump is in a category all his own”, he added.Since leaving office, Trump’s hotels have announced deals in Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Vietnam. He’s hawked official Trump coins, a Trump-branded Bible, the “never surrender” high-top sneakers and “the ugliest watch I have ever seen in my life”, said Oliver. “It makes your wrist look like it’s having a midlife crisis. It looks like it was made by melting down King Charles.“The fact Trump is willing to slap his name on random products is nothing new. It’s always been part of his MO,” he continued. “But the scope of his business ventures has actually escalated sharply,” which makes sense – since leaving office, Trump has racked up millions in legal expenses and has multiple judgments worth hundreds of millions against him. “Does nearly half a billion in penalties hanging over his head make the greediest man to ever live even greedier?” Oliver wondered. “Maybe, maybe not. After all, Trump is always operating at maximum greed, the same way the ocean is always operating at maximum wet.“But it does mean that he is a little more desperate,” Oliver continued, because if Trump’s appeals fail and he doesn’t come up with the money, courts could order his assets – including his beloved Mar-a-Lago resort – seized and sold. The incentive is to make more money than even, and if he wins the election, “he’s got some troubling new ways to do that”, said Oliver.Oliver recapped the guardrails during Trump’s first term which, unfortunately, weren’t so much legal guardrails as “norms that could be ignored”. Trump wasn’t required to release his tax returns or put his assets in a blind trust, so he didn’t. “If Trump is not required to do something, he’s not doing it,” Oliver noted. “It’s why he doesn’t say he lost the last election, or hug his children, or bother to learn the fucking dance moves to YMCA – for the love of God, move your arms above your shoulders, you human pot roast.”Trump instead put his assets into a revocable trust that he could access any time, run by his sons Eric and Don Jr as well as the company CFO, Allen Weisselberg, who has gone to jail twice for lying under oath and dodging taxes.Trump also blew past whatever laws did exist over presidential finances. The emoluments clause of the US constitution forbids the president from accepting money or gifts of any kind from foreign governments unless he obtains consent of Congress to do so, but his businesses made $7.8m from 20 foreign governments during his time in office. The top spenders were China, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.“In any other universe, ‘president accepts money from foreign governments’ would be immediately disqualifying,” said Oliver. “Unfortunately, we live in this universe, where a candidate for president has been criminally indicted four times and convicted of 34 felony counts thus far, his running mate sees women as walking incubators and Reba McEntire still hasn’t done Hot Ones. This is not the ideal timeline!”Trump’s financial violations during his presidency were the subject of several lawsuits, but he left office before they were settled, leading the supreme court to dismiss the matter as moot in January 2021. “Basically, he ran out the clock,” said Oliver. “So there is no evidence to suggest that Trump won’t carry on his personal enrichment during a second term.”And he has more avenues to do so, if elected again. Since leaving office, Trump launched Trump Media & Technology Group, whose flagship product is Truth Social, or as Oliver called it, “the Maga version of Twitter, a phrase that is now totally redundant”. The company is now Trump’s highest-valued financial holding by far, though that does not reflect the lackluster performance of Truth Social, which is the 1,174th most popular website in the US. But because presidents are not bound by federal conflict of interest law, Trump could use the office of the president to artificially boost the stock to his personal enrichment. American companies seeking to curry favor could buy ads on the platform and foreign governments looking to do the same could buy shares of the company.Public companies are still subject to some regulation; his ventures into crypto, on the other hand, are not. In the past two years, Trump has launched his own branded NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which have made him at least $7.2m off what Oliver declared “worthless pieces of shit”.The Trump family has also launched a vague crypto-focused company called World Liberty Financial with Trump as its “chief crypto advocate”. The company “intends to build a platform that will allow users to trade, borrow and lend cryptocurrencies”, according to its “Gold Paper”.If Trump wins, it’s expected that he will directly influence regulations – or lack thereof – of crypto companies, which one expert described as “conflict of interest 101”. “This is obviously extremely dangerous, but especially in a place that’s so new,” said Oliver. With crypto, Oliver summarized, Trump would not only be exploiting loopholes, but creating the loopholes in real time.“It was clear before Trump was elected that he’d use the presidency to enrich himself,” Oliver noted. “But in a second term, the landscape is very different. We’re no longer talking about a tacky Florida country club that CEOs or foreign officials can visit for special access to the president. It’s two new companies in branches of technology that we’re still trying to figure out how to regulate, that could expose him to new levels of risk and provide avenues for people to funnel money to him and influence him.“None of this is the biggest reason not to vote for him,” he concluded. “But it’s another good one to put alongside the many, many others.” More