Seth Meyers: 'This is what you get when you make a TV star president'
Seth Meyers
As several states began tentative, and risky, reopening measures, Donald Trump held a town hall at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday night exclusively for Fox News – which “makes sense”, said Seth Meyers on Late Night, because Trump is “constantly either in a state of watching Fox or appearing on Fox or watching himself appearing on Fox. Eventually Fox is just going to turn into a 24/7 feed of Trump watching himself on Fox like an infinity mirror.”
The White House has basically become a Fox News offshoot of advisers for the president, Meyers continued, such as his new press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who held her first press conference last week. The hiring of McEnany, a former Fox production assistant, epitomizes “the feedback loop of disinformation and propaganda that exists between the Trump White House and Fox News”, said Meyers. McEnany is known, for example, for defending Trump on cable news in February with “outlandish lies” such as “this president will always put America first, he will always protect American citizens, we will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here”.
Fox News also played a destructive role in what the Washington Post called Trump’s “lost month” of “desperation and dysfunction” as he ignored and then gave up on fighting coronavirus and instead focused, at the behest of aides and his favorite Fox News hosts, on prematurely opening up the economy. The Post reports that frequent Fox News guest and “Trump’s toothless vampire” Rudy Giuliani and host Laura Ingraham lobbied the president repeatedly, in White House meetings and on air, to embrace the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine (“Remember when everyone cared about that for a second? The Tamagotchi of Covid cures,” said Meyers) as a coronavirus treatment (it is not proven and can have fatal side-effects). “Yeah, the TV president who played a TV businessman is listening to TV doctors,” Meyers said.
Still, it’s confirmation that “a Fox host with no medical expertise [Ingraham] is directly advising the president on a deadly pandemic, while that same president hires pundits he sees on TV and fires or punishes actual experts and inspector generals who criticize him”, said Meyers. “This is what you get when you make a TV star president. Because when you’re on TV, no one ever tells you you’re wrong.”
McEnany, meanwhile, “completed the Fox News feedback loop” and transitioned seamlessly to “White House liar” on Friday by ending her briefing with a plug for Trump’s town hall on Fox, which she promised would have high TV ratings. “Oh, cool, so in the middle of a deadly pandemic, the White House press secretary is like a glorified TV Guide channel,” said Meyers, breaking out a faux-promo voice: “Looking for willful ignorance from a soulless sociopath? Check out the Fox News Town Hall at seven.”
Stephen Colbert
“No surprise, Trump is lying,” said Stephen Colbert of the president’s Fox News town hall on Sunday night. “He’s willfully endangering the lives of Americans” with his plan to reopen, as confirmed by an internal government memo, leaked to the New York Times, which revealed the Trump administration predicts a near doubling of the daily death toll by June.
“That means infection rates will skyrocket!” said Colbert. “Everybody’s going to have to go back inside and America’s going to have to find another animal exploitation true crime drama to watch.”
Trump’s town hall was billed as “America Together: Returning to Work”, “and Trump not only thought that the returning to work would happen soon, he thought this disaster might actually make things better”, said Colbert, pulling up a clip of Trump promising: “You’re going to get another job, but you’re going to get a better job. You’ll get a job where you make more money, frankly, and I think that’s going to happen.”
“Really? A better job, with more money? So it’s kinda good that you ignored the virus?” Colbert scoffed, whipping out his Trump impersonation: “I think this is gonna be even better because the pigs that just flew out of my butt told me they’re hiring, so that’s a positive.”
Trump was also asked about his combative stance with the press, which he defended as necessary because he’s “treated worse” than Lincoln was. “Really? You’re going to compare yourself to Abraham Lincoln?” said Colbert. “Well I’d like to point out that none of his supporters carried Confederate flags.”
Trevor Noah
And on the Daily Show, Trevor Noah addressed plans to reopen state economies, even as coronavirus case numbers increase across the country. “You would think an increase in cases would mean that maybe now is not the perfect time to open everything up,” said Noah, “but many states in America are saying, ‘hey man, this summer is not gonna enjoy itself.’” Florida beaches, for example, are teeming with people again.
Still, “people on the beach might be the least of America’s worries,” said Noah, “because there are other groups doing much crazier things,” such as protesting against shutdown measures by storming statehouses with weapons. “Goddamn, only in America do protests start with storming the Capitol with assault rifles. I mean, did you try calling? Writing a letter? Usually the armed rebellion is the last step.”
Noah played a video in which two white female protesters badgered police officers and white men with rifles prowled the Michigan statehouse. “Now, I’m sure a lot of these people probably saw this video and said to themselves, ‘man, if black people were holding guns and shouting at the police, that protest would end badly,’” said Noah. “But guys, please, that’s not true – the protest wouldn’t have ended badly. There wouldn’t have been a protest, because all the black people would’ve been pulled over on the way there.”
This article was amended on 5 May 2020 to correct Kayleigh McEnany’s previous job title.