Trevor Noah on attack ads: ‘We don’t accept this in any other job’
Trevor Noah continued his week of live shows in Atlanta on Wednesday evening, and noted the number of campaign ads he had seen and heard during his time in Georgia. “If you only knew Stacey Abrams from attack ads in Georgia, you would think she was Darth Vader combined with Thanos combined with that asshole who cut you off in the traffic. Pure evil,” he joked.
Attack ads are not exclusive to Georgia, a highly competitive swing state in the midterm elections next week, and “it’s not just mean in this moment”, the Daily Show host said. “It’s getting meaner, every single day. Every campaign in America right now is flooding the airwaves with attack ads.”
Noah argued that attack ads should be illegal – not campaign ads, just attack ads, because “they drive polarization and hate. And secondly, politicians should be earning your vote by telling you what they’re going to do, not just shitting on other candidates.
“We don’t accept this shit in any other job,” he continued. “There’s no other job where you can apply for it and then your résumé isn’t what you do, it’s just a list of all the reasons why the other people suck.”
Solely decrying one’s opponent is “not campaigning”, he concluded. “That’s not winning votes. It shouldn’t be a part of democracy.”
Stephen Colbert
With the midterms now less than a week away, Republicans and Democrats are “making their closing arguments to voters”, said Stephen Colbert on the Late Show. “The GOP’s argument is: stop voting.”
Donald Trump and other GOP figures have encouraged “poll watchers” to intimidate voters at ballot drop boxes across the country. Colbert showed photos of men in Arizona dressed in ski masks and body armor. “That outfit is appropriate for only two things: intimidating voters or assassinating James Bond in the Alps,” he joked.
On Tuesday, an Arizona judge ordered armed election “monitors” to stay at least 250ft away from drop boxes.
“I think it’s fair to say democracy is in danger when ballot boxes take out a restraining order,” Colbert noted.
Colbert turned to the rightwing group the Oath Keepers, on trial for seditious conspiracy for their role in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. “January 6 wasn’t just about smashing glass and hanging Pence,” said Colbert. “It was also about apps for the table,” as prosecutors claim that Oath Keepers met for a late-night meal after the attack at an Olive Garden.
“That explains their new slogan: ‘When you’re here, your family didn’t hug you enough as a child,’” Colbert joked.
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers mocked the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who has been subpoenaed by an Atlanta grand jury investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.
Back in 2021, Graham called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on the heels of an infamous phone call with Donald Trump, in which the then-president asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 extra votes. Graham has claimed that his call to Raffensperger was an innocent question about how mail voting worked – “I think I have every right in the world to reach out and say how does it work?” he told reporters.
“That’s right, he was just curious about how mail voting works,” Meyers laughed. “So instead of just Googling it or hopping on a bike and pedalling down to the town library, he decided to call an election official right as the president he was supporting was in the midst of orchestrating a coup to stay in power. It’s just an innocent coincidence! It’s like how when I want to check if my internet is working, I’ll Google ‘is it bad that I put my kid’s college fund into bitcoin?’”
The supreme court this week refused Graham’s attempt to block a subpoena in the case, meaning he will testify in Georgia later this month. “Damn, he couldn’t even get his bro Brett Kavanaugh to help him out,” Meyers quipped.
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel poked fun at Elon Musk, who “offered way too much for Twitter”.
“Now I guess he’s trying to get back as much of that $44bn investment as he can” with a paywall video plan, in which users would charge others to view videos on their feed. “Which is really a good idea – you know, I was browsing Instagram the other night and said this is great but I wish it wasn’t so free,” Kimmel deadpanned.
“I feel like Elon Musk being the owner of Twitter now is the tech equivalent of Michael Jordan trying to play baseball.”
In other social media news, one of the commissioners at the FCC has called on the federal government to ban TikTok in the US out of concerns that China is using it to obtain private information on US citizens. “I get it, but if Americans really cared about our private information, ‘password’ wouldn’t be the fifth most common password,” Kimmel noted. “Between TikTok, Twitter and Facebook, seems like the safest app nowadays might be Tinder.”