Seth Meyers takes a closer look at the ugly footrace between Trump’s scandals and his budget
In his “A Closer Look” segment on last night’s Late Night With Seth Meyers, Meyers urged caution. No, not against reading too much into the mounting-daily Trump-Russia scandals, because those continue to be written in official memos in letters about ten feet high. You know, like the ones former FBI director James Comey kept, documenting that time Donald Trump told him to back off investigating resigned-in-disgrace national security pal Michael Flynn and swear a Godfather-esque “loyaty oath.” And now the memos from National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers, who claims that Trump asked both him and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats to “publicly deny” any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. (They declined.) As Meyers said of all the furious note-taking about this glaringly clear obstruction of justice by a sitting president, it’s like, every time Trump meets with someone, they immediately think, “Trump is so crazy! Damn, I gotta write this shit down!”
No, Meyers, urged viewers to slow down on all the schadenfreude with regard to any hypothetical months- or years-long impeachment process and to focus on all the damage Trump can do in the meantime. Referring to Trump’s “cruel” and “savage” budget announced this week, Meyers went down its long, long list of greedy ugliness, from the fact that it seeks to gut Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, children’s health program CHIP, the food stamp program, and probably something about puppies just for yucks, to predictions that Trump’s “wish list” would actually impact his “white, non-college-educated” base hardest, to the fact that it does literally every awful thing candidate Trump claimed he would never, ever do.
Oh, and that the budget is based on a tiny, inconsequential math mistake—to the tune of 2 trillion dollars in ineptly or deceptively projected tax revenues. Which, as Meyers asserts, makes Trump’s very North Korean-sounding “The New Foundation For American Greatness” budget plan not only cruel, but “delusional” as well. So, Meyers suggests, it’s a good idea to pace yourselves, people.