Seth Meyers: 'If Mexico won’t pay for the wall, maybe Pfizer will'
Late-night hosts discussed prescription drug costs, Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony and Ivanka Trump’s claim that she knows what ordinary Americans want.
Seth Meyers
On Tuesday’s Late Night, Seth Meyers took a break from Michael Cohen’s impending congressional testimony and legal challenges to Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration to check in with the sky-high costs of prescription drugs in the US. The price for many life-saving drugs, such as insulin, has more than doubled in recent years, forcing people to resort to increasingly desperate measures for medicine. Meyers showed a clip from a recent NBC News segment that followed a group of Americans as they crossed the border into Tijuana to buy far cheaper insulin.
“So that’s where we are as a country right now: Trump’s trying to build a wall to prevent outsiders from coming in, while Americans are forced to cross the border into Mexico just to get affordable medication,” said Meyers. “Hey, if Mexico won’t pay for the wall, maybe Pfizer will.”
It’s a far cry from the president’s promise, in a Rose Garden speech from May of last year, that he would take on “the tangled web of special interests”, who, he noted, were not in attendance. The claim was “a nice sentiment”, said Meyers, “but unfortunately most of the
people there do take massive campaign donations from pharmaceutical companies. They are the special interests.
“Are you having trouble seeing them? If so, maybe it’s time you asked your doctor about Lotemax,” Meyers continued, slipping into the voice of a pharmaceutical commercial. “Lotemax: so you can clearly see that you’re full of shit.”
Trevor Noah
On The Daily Show, Trevor Noah prepared for Wednesday’s televised testimony before Congress by former Trump fixer and “clinically depressed Goodfella” Michael Cohen. Reports swirled on Tuesday that Cohen, who served for years as Trump’s personal lawyer, would testify to Trump’s pattern of dishonesty and racist comments.
“Good Lord, this is huge. Michael Cohen is going to testify under oath that President Trump is a liar, a cheater, a womanizer and a racist,” Noah deadpanned. “What other bombshells is he going to drop? Is he also going to tell us that Abraham Lincoln didn’t die of natural causes? That Double Stuf Oreos are just regular Oreos with more stuff ?”
To be fair, Cohen could potentially prove that Trump was involved in specific criminal acts, including while he was president, which “would be big news if it turned out that Trump stopped playing golf and watching TV long enough to commit crimes”, said Noah.
While one of Trump’s most loyal associates breaks rank, his family is still toeing the party line: Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, gave an interview to Fox News in which she said that most Americans want to work rather than be guaranteed an income. Noah called BS. “Ivanka Trump says the thing she’s learned in life is that people want to work for what they get? Really? The woman whose résumé just says: ‘Daddy, I need job now’?”
He also wasn’t buying her claim that people don’t want free things. “People love free shit … I’ve been to Costco – I’ve seen people put on disguises to get a second free sample of Bagel Bites.” Jimmy Kimmel
“We’re all under the careful watch of Mike Pence today,” Jimmy Kimmel acknowledged at the top of his show, as Trump traveled to Vietnam – “reporting for duty only about 50 years late” – to meet with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.
The two were reportedly meeting for a small dinner, although Kimmel was suspicious of that claim. “Already I don’t believe it – neither one of those two have ever eaten a small dinner,” he joked.
Meanwhile, back in the US, Cohen prepared to testify against his former boss. Despite the 12-hour time difference between DC and Hanoi, Trump was still, according to some reports, planning to stay up late to watch Cohen’s testimony. “So that should put him in the right mood to talk denuclearization,” Kimmel said.
Finally, Kimmel touched on the national emergency declaration, which the House voted to officially reject on Tuesday “because it doesn’t meet the legal standard known as being an emergency situation”, said Kimmel. The rebuke might even continue, with some Republican support, through the Senate – “a huge embarrassment for Trump”, Kimmel noted, “if he was capable of feeling shame, which he is not”.