Trevor Noah on police brutality video: 'What happened to protect and serve?'
Late-night hosts made light of Trump’s re-election campaign efforts, his interview with George Stephanopoulos, and his recent polls. Trevor Noah, however, chose to focus on a video that shows a violent encounter with police.
Trevor Noah
“Well, no one actually thinks of Phoenix but if they were forced to, what would they think of?” opened The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah. “It would probably be the extreme heat or a college you can graduate from in three weeks or the fact that the city’s basketball team has the world’s most random mascot.” But then Noah turned to the actual issue of the Arizona city: it had 44 police shootings last year, the worst of all large cities in the country. A recently released video shows a young black couple and their children held at gunpoint by the police, which Noah somberly broke down for his audience. Cops forced the family to get out of their car at gunpoint while yelling threats like “I’m going to bust a cap in your fucking head.” Noah questioned the decency of the cop and the situation. “What happened to protect and serve? Like, I’m sorry. Everything about that video is wrong.” Noah also took issue with the language of the cop. “He’s talking about busting caps like he’s a lost member of NWA … There’s no excuse for this, except maybe the cop says he arrests people in the way that he thinks that they speak.
“Maybe he’s like, ‘Ayo, black man, get your ass on the ground. And as for you, ese, you better stop acting like a pendejo. And you, Belgian guy, I don’t know how you speak. Waffles, waffles, waffles.”
The police arrived because their four-year-old daughter had apparently walked out of the store without paying for a doll, unbeknownst to the parents who were later held at gunpoint. The
host called it a blatant overreaction: “If anything, you should be rescuing the little girl from the Barbie. Should be getting there like, ‘Little girl, watch out! That Barbie can give you a warped sense of what a woman’s body is supposed to be!’”
The host highlighted the role reversal of the cops and the calm civilians recording the video. “I’m sorry, guys. This is ridiculous. How do civilians know how to act like the police better than police know how to act like the police?” The cops later downplayed their roles in the event and did not report the accurate version of events. “You know what’s most troubling about this, is that it makes you wonder how many people have been arrested and put in jail, because everyone assumes the police version of the event is always the truth,” he said to applause from the audience. “Time and time again, cellphone videos contradict the official report.”
The family is suing for $10m, to which Noah said: “Won’t erase what happened to them, but it will help that little girl buy a shitload of those dolls.”
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert started The Late Show with an election day countdown– only 504 days until 3 November 2020. “Not that I’m counting.”
The latest news from the campaign is Donald Trump kicking off his 2020 campaign with a rally in Orlando. “It makes sense he would do it in the home of Disney because his ideas are goofy and his base is snow white. Also with his climate policies, we’re all going to end up Under the Sea.” His approval rating in the Florida city is 29%, “and most of that is from Sea World after he held that big meeting with the ‘Prince of Whales’,” referencing Trump’s typo from a week ago.
But Trump apparently faces trouble as all polls including those of Fox News and his own campaign show him losing. Trump has apparently fired his pollsters. “That’s like firing a canary in coalmine for its bad attitude,” said Colbert. A pollster from Trump’s camp later said the polls represent the worst-case scenario of voter turnout. Colbert flipped it: “Voters turning out is their worstcase scenario.”
Seth Meyers
Seth Meyers focused on Trump’s revealing ABC interview. In one of the clips, Trump made his chief of staff leave the room after coughing, to which Meyers responded: “Just remember that the next time Donald Trump says he has a great healthcare plan, the plan is if you cough, get the [bleep] out of here.” The host theorized the cough was actually a signal for Trump to stop talking, but Trump forgot. “Dude, you’d be better off if every answer you gave was interrupted by coughing.”
The interview with Stephanopoulos began with a few softball questions, like how many hours Trump slept and which meals he liked best. This is the kind of interview Meyers believe Trump wants, “He wants the same questions you’d ask while FaceTiming with your grandpa in his retirement home.” But Meyers pointed out the strategy in this soft approach. “But this is how you rope-a-dope Trump. You bring the rope, he brings the dope.”
Later in the interview, Trump called Stephanopoulos a wiseguy. “Every time you think Trump couldn’t sound more like a Scorsese character, he finds a way. This interview should have had a voiceover by Henry Hill.” Trump later told the ABC News reporter he would accept intel from foreign governments about his political opponents. “Wow, dude. You would have been better off if THAT answer had been interrupted by coughing.”
The New York Times reported Pentagon officials have placed cyber-malware into Russia’s power grid but are afraid to tell Trump because he might talk about it. “This is probably why Trump spends all of his time showing off new paint colors for Air Force One because that’s the only thing his aides trust him to do.”