Perhaps unable to hold back after a week off spent helplessly watching a potentially game-changing story play out, Late Night With Seth Meyers posted host Meyers’ nightly “A Closer Look” segment online in advance of Monday’s show. And while Meyers ran through nine days or so of various mockable Trump nonsense (his unsettlingly grabby handshake with French President Macron and first lady Brigitte Macron; Trump’s current scheme to make his proposed Game Of Thrones wall transparent so no one gets brained by hurled bales of Mexican drugs; Trump playing fireman and cowboy), most of the 14-minute segment took on Donald Trump Jr.’s admitted (and repeatedly amended) account of Russian collusion.
After being tempted to a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer with promises of juicy dirt on dad’s presidential opponent Hillary Clinton (and roping in Trump insiders Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort with a series of emails that couldn’t be more incriminating if written with Cyrillic characters) little Donald was pressed to explain himself, young man. As Meyers pointed out, the junior Trump’s evolving excuses went from It was all about Russian adoption, to Yeah, they promised damaging Clinton info but I totally didn’t get any, to Everybody does it and we all would collude with a hostile foreign power to smear an opponent and win an election, right guys?, all in the space of the few days when that “fake media” his pops is always railing against kept producing more and more pesky, damning facts.
Aiding in the quest to shore up the idea that conspiring with another country that’s actively seeking to sway an American election in defiance of the will of the American people is just good ol’ politics-as-usual was Trump’s increasingly sweaty pet network, Fox News. Meyers showed how Fox went into full-on “abetting actual, provable collusion” mode, with Fox bellowing head and Trump pal Jeanine Pirro sneering at those who wouldn’t, as she claimed she definitely would, gleefully climb aboard “the first trolley to hell” should Satan himself offer up some useful oppo research. As Meyers exclaimed, it’s like Trump supporters “go out of their way to make themselves sound as nefarious as possible.” (Fellow Fox megaphone Eric Bolling is shown trying to pin Trump Jr.’s clear collusion on Hillary Clinton… somehow.) Going on to show how noted not-genius Donald Jr. has also dragged in Kushner and Manafort (each of whom have offered their own “dog ate my homework”-quality excuses), Meyers is clearly gearing up for the ongoing echoes of this very smoking gun, noting that, at this point in the saga of the Trump family, “nothing is too stupid to be true.”