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      Seth Meyers on JD Vance’s debate performance: ‘Brazen and shameless’

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      Late-night hosts talk JD Vance’s many lies during the vice-presidential debate and a new special counsel report detailing how Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election.Seth MeyersDonald Trump is “a bad liar”, said Seth Meyers on Wednesday’s Late Night, but he chose as his running mate “someone who is much more polished at it”. JD Vance, Ohio senator, is “brazen and shameless, but he’s admittedly very smooth. He’s like a slick used car dealer, and can be very convincing until you remember the car he’s trying to sell you is an AMC Gremlin with raccoons in the engine.”For instance, during the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday evening, Vance claimed that he was not in favor of a national abortion ban, but did support a “minimum national standard”.“That’s a ban,” Meyers corrected. “A ‘minimum national standard’ is just a bullshit way of describing a national abortion ban. It’s like when I go to the coffee shop on my block and they say they sell all-natural, gluten-free breakfast biscuits. That’s a cookie, dude. Except now you’ve guaranteed that my kids won’t stop asking me why they can’t have it.”Vance has said multiple times that he favors a national abortion ban. On a rightwing podcast in 2022, he said: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”“That’s what happens when you say yes to every rightwing podcast in the universe,” said Meyers. “JD Vance is on record contradicting every thing he says now. Politicians used to be worried about being caught on a hot mic. But now they go into every McMansion basement they can find like they’re on a hot mic scavenger hunt.”Vance also refused to say whether Trump lost the 2020 election. When asked point blank by his opponent, Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, Vance deflected with: “I’m focused on the future.”“If you ask someone a straightforward question and they say ‘I’m focused on the future’ that’s how you know they’re caught in a lie,” said Meyers. “Vance may have delivered a slick performance last night, but it was just that – a performance.”Stephen Colbert“We are all still struggling to digest last night’s vice-presidential debate – which is surprising, because usually I have no trouble eating two slices of white bread,” joked Stephen Colbert on Wednesday night.The Late Show host described the debate as a “frosty cup of ZzzQuil”, as the two politicians performed civility and appeared to frequently agree with each other.The Atlantic described the debate as “a vision of what American politics could be without the distorting gravitational field generated by Donald Trump”.“I would love that,” said Colbert, “but here’s the thing: Donald Trump hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s still the main character. This is like a scene from It without Pennywise on camera, and everyone is suddenly like, ‘Welp, guess there’s no more scary clowns in Derry. Ooh, free sewer balloon!’”Colbert took particular aim at Vance’s answer to a question on Obamacare, which Trump tried to destroy numerous times: “I think you could make a really good argument that [Trump] salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along.”“That kind of junior high debate team sophistry is exactly the worst kind of behavior that intelligent people use to justify evil,” added Colbert. “You know, when you think about it, it could be argued that Godzilla really spearheaded Tokyo’s urban renewal.”Colbert was also incensed at Vance’s characterization of January 6: “It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th.”“Yeah, 14 days after his plot to overthrow the election ended in a violent coup that failed,” said Colbert. “That’s like saying to your ex: ‘Barbara, I think it’s rich that you’re calling me psychotically obsessed with our relationship, when I left your and Brad’s wedding peacefully. You’re the one who won’t stop talking about me setting fire to the DJ.’”Jimmy KimmelAnd in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel looked ahead to election day: “We are 34 days away from Trump saying the election was rigged, just as he did four years ago.” Trump’s efforts to overturn the election four years ago are detailed in a new report from special counsel Jack Smith.The judge overseeing the January 6 case in Washington unsealed a 165-page court filing containing a “mountain” of testimony and evidence against Trump. “All the stuff we know happened, we now have in writing,” said Kimmel.The filing lays out “the increasingly desperate ways Trump tried to steal the election”, Kimmel explained. “You know, sometimes I would wonder, does Trump really believe that this election was stolen from him? And the answer is no, he doesn’t. The plan all along was to declare himself the winner even he if wasn’t, which he did. And then when he realized he was going to lose, he made up these claims of fraud.“He called governors and election officials,” he continued. “He hammered Mike Pence. He deliberately spread lies, even though he privately admitted they were crazy lies. He was directly involved in the fake elector scheme. And he stole all the Oreos from the White House snack cabinet.”The report also detailed just how many times Trump pressured Mike Pence to try to decertify the election, though he had no authority to do so. “There were meetings, phone calls, text messages – Pence was basically Trump’s Baby Reindeer,” Kimmel joked. More

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      Jimmy Kimmel on Trump campaign hacks: ‘Shows that his password is McNuggets123’

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      Late-night hosts talk the Trump campaign’s multiple campaign hacks, Kamala Harris’s lead among young voters and a dubious new Trump merchandise product.Jimmy KimmelThe Trump campaign has now been hacked twice in the last two months, “which is what happens when you store secret documents next to the urinal at a golf course”, said Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday evening.Intelligence officials suspect Iran is behind at least one attack, leading campaign spokesman Steven Cheung to claim that the attacks show how Iran is “terrified of the strength and resolve of Donald J Trump”.“And it also shows that his password is McNuggets123,” Kimmel joked.One of the journalists who received the leaked documents said the material may be “embarrassing or problematic” to members of the Trump campaign. “As if anyone who works for the Trump campaign is capable of embarrassment,” Kimmel noted.In other campaign news, Trump was in Georgia on Tuesday, “where they’re working very hard to fix the election for him”, and “once again, he had a lil McFit about whether or not Kamala Harris worked at McDonalds”. Trump repeatedly and falsely said Harris never worked for the fast-food chain, calling her past employment a “lie”.“He really should just be running for Mayor McCheese,” said Kimmel. “It’s so dumb, it’s so petty, but so is he.”Seth MeyersOn Late Night, Seth Meyers laughed at Trump’s campaign trail confession that his “personality defect” is wanting people to like him. “By his own confession, he likes people who like him, and that’s it,” said Meyers. “He doesn’t care about policy or character or integrity. He you like him, he likes you.”That’s why Trump endorsed Mark Robinson, the scandal-plagued Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina. In multiple appearances, Trump praised Robinson, who is Black, saying: “I’ve gotten to know him so well.” He also described Robinson as a “fine wine”, “Martin Luther King on steroids” and “Martin Luther King times two”.“He’s really truly amazing,” said Meyers of Trump. “Everyone agrees Martin Luther King is a great person, but only Trump would say ‘I know someone twice as good! Every night he has two dreams!’”Among Robinson’s numerous scandals is a CNN report of his past racist comments on a pornographic website called Nude Africa, including calling himself a “black Nazi”. In another comment, Robinson, using his full name in his username, said slavery was “not bad” and that he wished it would come back.“First of all, who uses their full name on a porn website?” Meyers wondered. “I don’t even use my full name when I make a dinner reservation – I use Jimmy Fallon, because I want a table.”Despite his past support of Robinson, the Trump campaign is now pretending they don’t know him, and have removed joint events from their calendar. “A healthy, functional political party would do some introspection about how and why they keep attracting deranged extremists and anti-social weirdos like these guys,” Meyers concluded. “But the GOP would rather lie and pretend they have never had anything to do with Robinson in the first place.”Stephen ColbertAnd on the Late Show, Stephen Colbert cited a new Harvard youth voting poll that found Harris leads young female voters 70% to 23%. “Young women are going to save us all. And young men are going to play Xbox and see how high they can jump off a big rock,” Colbert joked.In an effort to attract young voters, the Harris campaign has committed to visiting over 150 college campuses. “Ooh, 150, she’s trying to break Matt Gaetz’s record,” Colbert quipped. “I’m kidding, obviously he’d never date a college girl. Or, as he calls them, mature honeys.”According to a polling director at Harvard, the results show “a significant shift in the overall vibe”.“Yeah the vibes are immaculate,” Colbert said. “The analysis shows that Harris ate and left no crumbs. Her campaign had a bussin’ glow-up. In conclusion, the children have broken my brain. Boots king!”In other news, “Trump may be busy campaigning, but he’ll never lose sight of his first love: selling garbage,” said Colbert. On Tuesday, the former president announced that he’d be selling silver Trump coins with his face on them. The coins are selling for $100 apiece, though the silver they’re made of only costs $30.“What a deal!” Colbert deadpanned, before imagining one man’s justification for buying the coins: “Honey, I know I bought a Trump coin at a 210% loss, but you can use the Trump coin to buy Truth Social stock, and once that eventually bounces back we’ll invest the profit in an NFT trading card of his gold sneakers, which is pegged to the price of the little pieces of his suit we got from when he got arrested, then convert it to Trump crypto, which we’ll use to buy Melania’s book, which, get this, is worth one Trump silver coin.” More

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      Jon Stewart on Harris’s debate performance: ‘She crushed that’

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      Late-night hosts recapped the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on ABC News.Jon StewartJon Stewart took over his guest perch at the Daily Show on Tuesday for a live post-debate show, reeling from over 90 minutes of heated conversation between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.“I just want to say that after surviving the PTSD of the last presidential debate, how unbelievably refreshing it is to go back to the same old nobody is going to answer any fucking questions! We’re back!” Stewart joked of the “cliches” and “baseless ad hominems” of American political theater.Early in the matchup, Trump claimed that “everybody” wanted Roe v Wade overturned and the legality of abortion left up to states, which Harris accurately disputed. “I have talked with women around our country,” she said. “You wanna talk about, this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the healthcare providers are afraid they might go to jail – and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that.”“Holy shit! She crushed that,” said Stewart.Stewart ran through highlights of the debate, including when Harris got under Trump’s skin about the crowd sizes at his rallies, or when Trump tried to deny that he had any role in January 6. But ultimately, “I don’t know if this debate is going to change anything,” said Stewart. “People are often set in the manner that they view these proceedings. What I think is a home run answer for one candidate, someone else views as a dodge or a lie.“It doesn’t matter what they say any more, but one thing will always be true – and it is the quality of the former president I respect the least,” he continued. “Whenever he is cornered and forced to face even the smallest of consequences for his own mendacity and scheming, he reverts to the greatest refuge of scoundrels.”That would be the classic line of deflection – “it wasn’t me” – which Trump basically used for January 6.“This man, who constantly professes to be your champion, who says they’re going to have to go through him to get to you, will always, when the boat is going down, be the first into the lifeboats,” Stewart declared with palpable anger. “Because in that moment, he will always say the same thing: ‘I didn’t know anything about it, I was just told to show up for a cruise.’ Even though, everybody knows, he was the fucking captain of the ship.“In any other country, that lack of accountability would be disqualifying,” he concluded.Stephen Colbert“Unlike the first presidential debate back in June, this time the Democratic candidate was able to walk out to the stage without pausing for a nap,” said Stephen Colbert on the Late Show.The host was impressed with the vice-president’s performance. “Kamala Harris came in needing to rattle Trump’s cage,” he said. “And now that it’s over, they are still looking for pieces of his cage in low orbit.“Harris got under his skin like she was stuffing in butter and rosemary. It was beautiful,” he continued. “By the end of the debate, the meat was falling off the bone.”Trump was “so nonsensical” throughout the debate, that Harris “looked at him the way a parent looks at a kid giving a presentation on why they should be allowed to get a pet tiger”.When the moderators asked a basic question on Roe v Wade, Trump “lied so fragrantly” that the ABC News moderator Linsey Davis had to intervene with the fact-check “there is no state where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born”.“Follow up question: can a moderator win a debate?” Colbert quipped.Harris often returned to a theme of looking toward the future, to “turn the page” on the Trump years.“Actually, turning the page seems kind of mild,” said Colbert. “I would say we should burn the book, but that’s really more his thing.”Jimmy KimmelIn Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel also dug into “the debate of the decade”.“It was like watching the Lorax debate the Grinch tonight,” he said. “Usually when Trump gets a spanking like this from a woman it’s with a Forbes magazine. Kamala was pushing his buttons like a 12-year-old playing Fortnite.”Though Republicans urged Trump to stay focused on the issues, he did anything but. “Who are we kidding? This election isn’t about the issues,” said Kimmel. “Dick Cheney isn’t voting for Kamala Harris because he agrees with her on the issues. He’s voting for her because there’s a rhinoceros charging, and she has the tranquilizer gun.”Kimmel zeroed in on the moment when Trump repeated false stories about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs, which has been repeatedly debunked. Nevertheless, Trump said: “They’re eating all the pets of the people that live there.”“I want you to imagine that we’ve never heard of Donald Trump before, and the first time you’ve ever seen him was during tonight’s debate,” said Kimmel. “What would your reaction be right now? You’d be in shock. The Republican party would have to close their headquarters and turn them into a Spirit Halloween store.“How is it possible that half of this country thinks that it’s a good idea to give the guy who tried to overthrow our government another chance to run our government?” he concluded. “Like if someone poisoned all the jalapeño poppers at TGI Fridays, you wouldn’t interview them to be the chef!” More

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      John Oliver on Trump's refusal to concede: 'Absolutely unforgivable'

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      John Oliver tore into Donald Trump’s “pathetic, dangerous” refusal to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory on Last Week Tonight, after two weeks of the president’s attempts to delegitimize the results of the election with baseless claims of voter fraud, backed by most congressional Republicans. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, for example, said Trump is “100% within his rights” to challenge the election result, and chastised Democrats on the Senate floor for “any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election”.
      “First, no one expected Trump to immediately, cheerfully accept the results,” Oliver countered. “He’s incapable of cheerfully accepting anything apart from blowjobs, Nazi endorsements and the opportunity to scream inside a stranger’s truck,” to harken back to a photo-op from two years or what feels like two decades ago.

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      Furthermore, Democrats in Washington never refused to accept the election results in 2016: Hillary Clinton formally conceded the morning after election day, and Obama hosted Trump in the White House the day after that. “And yet Republicans are trying to defend their support for Trump’s indefensible behavior,” Oliver continued. One senior White House official asked the Washington Post: “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” which Oliver called “a question that never ends well, whether the ones asking it are overworked parents who need a break or the Weimar Republic”.
      The Trump campaign and its television surrogates on Fox News have lobbed numerous unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud before, during and after the election, and “if you’re a casual viewer of rightwing media, you might think, ‘Well, there must be something here, they wouldn’t be going to all this trouble over nothing’”, Oliver said. “But the thing is, they are. This really is nothing.”
      Oliver summarily disproved Trump voter fraud claims from Pennsylvania to Georgia to Michigan – “I could spend the rest of this show debunking stories,” he said. “The problem is, it’s endless” and often nonsensical. “And who knows why Republicans are entertaining this – maybe it’s the fact that Georgia has two Senate runoffs coming up and they want to keep Trump happy so he’ll help rally voters for him there,” Oliver added. “Maybe they’re currying favor with him because they’re worried he’ll be a power broker going forward, I don’t know. What I do know is that the answer to the question ‘what is the downside of humoring him?’ is a lot.”
      The Trump administration’s refusal to acknowledge the election’s outcome prevents Biden from receiving high-level intelligence reports or accessing funds for his transition team. More pressingly, it blocks Trump officials from sharing critical details of a distribution plan for a Covid vaccine with Biden’s team. As cases surge to new records across the country heading into the holiday season, “you really want the new team handling the pandemic to be able to talk to the old team,” said Oliver, “even if, as I suspect, the old team’s plan was just a single white board in Jared’s office with nothing on it other than ‘discover cure?’ circled five times and then a drawing of Donald Trump saying: ‘Good job, new son.’”
      Many of Trump’s election fraud claims are laughable or ridiculous, Oliver continued, but “the fact is, a lot of people believe stuff like that. And when you continually insist that the election was stolen in big cities and suggest that remedying this calls for the ‘biggest fight since the civil war’,” to quote a video retweeted by Trump of the actor Jon Voight comparing contesting Biden to battling Satan, “things start to get deadly serious.” Earlier this month, two armed men were arrested outside the Philadelphia convention center, where city officials were counting ballots. One of the city’s commissioners, a Republican, told CBS news that the vote-counting center had received threatening phone calls “reminding us that ‘this is what the second amendment is for’”.
      It’s clear, Oliver said in response to the situation in Philadelphia, that “Trump is playing a dangerous game here, because there’s a huge difference between ‘not my president’ and ‘not the president’. And to be clear, people who are that angry are not riling themselves up in a vacuum. They’ve been fed a steady diet of misinformation, bullshit fraud claims, and a victim narrative from outlets like Fox News, Newsmax, OANN and, most importantly, Trump himself.”
      Trump’s continued propagation of election conspiracy theories via Twitter since the election are an “appropriate coda to a presidency that has destroyed so many lives”, said Oliver. “So many of us have lost loved ones, either because you can no longer square your love for them with their love for him, or because they fell down a mind-melting rabbit hole of conspiracy theories that he happily perpetuated, or because he let a deadly virus run wild, and it fucking killed them.
      “And now, as a parting gift to the country,” he concluded, “Trump is somehow managing to divide us even further while also hobbling his successor at the worst possible time, which is absolutely unforgivable.” More