Late night TV grapples with the Donald Trump rally shooting

Election season coverage became a lot more complicated over the weekend after what is being described as an assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Tenacious D had to cancel all upcoming events after an off-color remark; The Daily Show canceled its on-the-ground RNC coverage and went back to the drawing board. Even President Joe Biden had to apologize for his metaphorical remark that it was “time to put Trump in a bullseye” made days before the shooting. Over in the late night world, a space that regularly (and rightfully!) makes fun of Trump, our hosts faced the challenge of tactfully addressing the issue as the news cycle presses relentlessly forward.

To make things easy, Jimmy Fallon skipped over the shooting entirely on The Tonight Show. Fallon, of course, has the spottiest record on election coverage after the 2016 Hair Mussing Incident, so maybe he just didn’t want to face any heat for handling a delicate subject poorly. Instead of the shooting, Fallon jumped right to Trump’s VP pick, JD Vance, and made fun of him instead.

Fallon’s NBC follow-up, Seth Meyers, is much more comfortable in the political realm, and a lot better at balancing sharp insight with humor. Meyers put a pause on jokes at the opening of Late Night to condemn and repudiate political violence “in all forms,” describing it as “a poison to democracy.”

Before criticizing some of the rhetoric around the shooting from Republicans—including from JD Vance—he said, “There is no autopilot setting for democracy. Every generation before us has had to do the difficult work of safeguarding this cherished enterprise, and now we’re called upon to do the same. That can feel at times like a daunting task, but the case for optimism and perseverance is this: Those generations succeeded. They protected democracy and passed it on to us. They witnessed political violence, from assassinations, to campaigns of racist terror, to attempted coups and they refused to succumb to a society where reason and humanity have failed, where violence rules. They built something better, and now it is our task to hold on to it.”

Filling in on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, guest host Anthony Anderson started his monologue by saying, “Everybody’s still shaken up by the tragic events at the Trump rally this Saturday. All weekend, I kept thinking, ‘I wonder what Jimmy Kimmel is going to say about this on Monday?’ And then I was like, oh, I am Jimmy Kimmel on Monday.” Anderson made some jokes about the fallout of the shooting, sharing Etsy merch that has popped up and snarking about some of the media coverage of the event. However, he also added that “hopefully this will be a moment that we can all take a step back from the hatred and vitriol in our politics and maybe chill the fuck out.”

The Late Show held a live episode following the opening of the Republican National Convention, but Stephen Colbert addressed the shooting in a pre-taped opener. “The United States came close to a great tragedy on Saturday when at a political rally down in Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old gunman shot and nearly killed a former president and the man who today became the 2024 Republican nominee,” the host said. “My immediate reaction when I saw this on Saturday was horror at what was unfolding, relief that Donald Trump had lived and, frankly, grief for my beautiful country—and then fresh horror, as we learned that attendees had also been shot, one of whom died at the rally.”

Colbert reflected on the acts of political violence we’ve seen in recent years, in addition to his childhood memory of watching John F. Kennedy’s funeral. “Not only is violence evil, it is useless,” he said. “As I quoted [science fiction writer Isaac Asimov] when Representative Steve Scalise was shot, ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’ Violence, or even calls for violence, invalidate any ideas.”

This election cycle was already fraught before the shooting, and it continues to get more heated as the Republicans and Democrats make their nominees official at each national convention. Colbert noted that the conventions are not just about the parties’ figureheads, but also “about the ideas that these two candidates represent and the future America they want to lead us to.” He said, “In the wake of this attack on Saturday, many Americans on both sides of the aisle, from President Biden to Speaker Johnson, are calling on all this to change how we see each other, how we treat each other, how we talk to each other. That may or may not happen, but those conflicting ideas will remain the same. So this week, we’re going to do our best to talk about those ideas, the people who represent those ideas, and many other things, with guests and who knows, if we’re lucky, maybe some fart jokes.”