When Trump’s away, Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert will mock the bejeezus out of him
With Donald Trump on a 17-day golfing vacation at one of his New Jersey golf havens, one might think that the late night comedy shows would have less to work with. Sure, like The Daily Show did on Monday, they could all do retrospectives on the first 200 days of America under Trump’s wee Titleist-gloved hand as, god knows, there’s always a superfluity of eminently spoofable Trump nonsense to catch up on. But Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers took advantage of the start of this rare period of relative calm to tee off both on this past weekend’s leftover Trump scandals, outrages, and affronts to American democracy, and the sputtering, furious tweets the holidaying president managed to shank out during a rainy, golf-less Monday morning and afternoon.
Both hosts took Trump to task for the shameless hypocrisy of Trump’s past statements condemning former President Obama for taking any time on the links, while himself racking up more taxpayer-funded golf junkets than the none he implied he’d take when denigrating his predecessor. (Check out this website dedicated to breaking down those numbers for a good, thorough look at just how much hypocrisy we’re talking about here.) Meyers, in his “A Closer Look” segment, deadpanned that Late Night With Seth Meyers had run out of clips of Trump making “no golfing, ever” campaign pledges—before throwing to a montage of about a dozen such snippets of Trump speeches where he induces his “you don’t have to induce us at all” crowds into derisively laughing at how time much time that bad, lazy Obama spent playing that frivolous, elitist, time-wasting sport that Trump’s spent his career playing and building garish shrines to. Colbert meanwhile tried out his signature deadpan readings of Trump’s defensive tweets about this being a “working vacation” by concluding with a sympathetic, “Man, I would not want to work for Vladimir Putin.” (Insert golf term denoting significant achievement here.)
Both Colbert and Meyers are old hands at finding new ways to point up just how disastrously ludicrous is the fact that Donald Trump is sits in the Oval Office. (You know, when he’s got a late tee-time.) But Trump keeps dropping new and fruitful nonsense for them to work with, as with the clip they both played of Trump lurching up to a wedding party at his New Jersey club in a golf cart and peremptorily demanding, “Where’s the bride? Come on!” Now, not that most blushing brides wouldn’t be delighted that a caught on tape like a Dateline predator sexual assault enthusiast would zoom up with thoughts of jus primae noctis on his mind, but, as Colbert put it, his statement is generally reserved for his wife-hunting visits to Eastern Europe. (Insert golf term indicating successful outcome in fewer strokes than average.)
With Trump choosing his own, gold-toileted sports palaces over that dump called the White House for a few weeks, the late night comics will have only the scurrying of Trump’s at-loose-ends minions to go after. Some for their Bond villain-esque pronouncements (as Meyers judges creepy white supremacist Sebastian Gorka), or suspiciously Trump-like hypocritical revelations (cue Fox News blowhard and alleged dick pic sender Eric Bolling), or even Vice President Mike Pence, who both hosts hint is using Trump’s absence to measure the Oval for new curtains. Still, there’ll always be Twitter, as long as Trump’s wifi never goes down. Never fear, as it’s reported that all Trump properties have the best wifi, the most powerful, amazing wifi in the history of the world. So that’s good news for comedy fans. And nervous brides.