Seth Meyers examines how the Trump-Russia conspiracy is crumbling in a tower of babble on Late Night

Every day in which Donald Trump occupies the White House is an exercise in snatching good news where you can find it. The (latest) Republican attempt to destroy the Affordable Care Act (and the millions of sick and poor Americans who benefit from it) seems to have stalled out? We’ll take it. Trump whines at one of his ego-stroking rallies about NFL players daring to make a public stand against social injustice and doubles down on his schoolyard taunting of (another) delusional, unstable world leader packing nuclear weapons? Look, we’re just going to cling to that “not murdering people for profit” thing for a little while longer, okay? Thankfully for those looking for far-off shimmers of hope that this nine-month national nightmare will end sooner rather than later, Seth Meyers used his “A Closer Look” segment on Friday’s Late Night to suggest that all the players in the mounting Trump-Russia collusion scandal are doing everything in their power to ensure that special counsel Robert’s Mueller’s gig is as easy as possible.

Meyers—employing the devious media tactic of “hitting play on a montage of widely-available public comments by people who’ve made it this far by denying incontrovertible facts”—showed how both former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former Trump communications director Sean Spicer respond to the simplest questions about possible collusion with all the cucumber-coolness of a murderer in the third act of a Columbo. (Meyers also noted how many formerly trusted Trump administration figures have been unceremoniously shitcanned already, stating that Trump presidential seal should be “a cardboard box with a fern sticking out of it.”) Both Manafort (subject of a Sopranos-style home raid by the FBI), and Spicer (currently flailing around on his image rehabilitation press tour) are shown melting down like faulty Westworld robots as soon as the subject of Russian involvement in the Trump campaign is brought up. Meyers—clearly delighting in the fact that this increasingly evident conspiracy of smug assholes treasonously lusting after power appears to have been perpetrated by a bunch of inept, blustering ding-dongs—taunts both to “use your words,” a phrase Spicer and Manafort’s armies of lawyers have no doubt been contradicting as this whole tragic farce steams toward its conclusion.