Seth Meyers: 'Fox hosts say the word Obama like it’s their safe word'
Seth Meyers
Two months into the coronavirus shutdown and America’s numbers are grim, Seth Meyers reported on Wednesday’s Late Night. More than 80,000 people have died in the US, and unemployment is at the highest rate since the Great Depression. On Tuesday, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, warned Congress that reopening the US too soon could lead to “needless suffering and death”. And yet, “instead of taking that danger seriously and correcting his mistakes, the porridge-brained adult toddler who’s in charge of keeping us all safe has spent the last few days obsessively rage-tweeting vague conspiracies about his predecessor,” said Meyers. This weekend, Donald Trump tweeted, apropos of nothing, “OBAMAGATE”, and when asked to explain what, exactly, Barack Obama did, he told reporters: “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody.”
“No, we don’t. And apparently never do you,” Meyers replied. “Trump’s so lazy he can’t even be bothered to come up with the details of his own fake scandal any more.
“Amid a horrific public health emergency that most voters agree he’s basically mishandled, the president is looking to prosecute his political opponents and elevate himself above the law,” Meyers added. “That’s because he knows the coronavirus pandemic and the cratering economy threaten his political survival. So he and his allies on state TV are casting about for anyone else to blame and now they’re obsessing, as they have for years, over Obama.” Meyers played a montage of Fox News hosts including Sean Hannity,
Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham picking up Trump’s lead this week and casting bogus blame on the former president.
“Fox hosts say the word Obama like it’s their safe word,” Meyers said. “Their obsession with Obama is akin to gossipy cheerleaders spreading rumors about the prom queen because they’re mad she won’t hang out with them.”
The pivot to Obama above all else demonstrates, Meyers concluded, how Republicans and Fox News would rather “live in an alternate universe where Obama was president and not Trump, because then they could at least lie and tell themselves they were a ragtag band of rebels instead of the marketing department for the Death Star”.
Stephen Colbert
Celebrating his birthday in quarantine on Wednesday (“Today I turned more at risk”), Stephen Colbert assessed the state of America’s coronavirus pandemic: “We’re all gonna have to get used to celebrating major holidays in a quarantine because this pandemic appears to be making itself comfortable.” Broadway announced this week that it will be closed until at least Labor Day. Cal State University canceled in-person classes for the fall. “Nobody likes that we have to do this,” said Colbert, “but we have to do this, according to health professionals” like Fauci, who warned a Senate panel on Tuesday on the risks of reopening too soon.
Fauci’s warning received pushback from some Republican senators seeking to reopen the country immediately. “Republicans are desperate to reopen the economy because if they don’t, they’ll have to do the unthinkable: give money to someone other than rich people,” Colbert explained.
Despite having about 4% of the world’s population, the US has over 25% of the cases and fatalities, Colbert pointed out, “yet Trump can’t stop patting himself on the back.” On Monday, he told reporters he’s “proud” of America’s death rate per 1,000 people, “perhaps the most important number”, which he compared to Germany’s.
“Oh, here’s another important number: 100%, which is how much of that he just yanked out of his keister,” Colbert interjected. “In fact, according to Johns Hopkins, in per capita death rate, the US ranks ninth highest out of 140 countries. The United States has a worse record than such medical powerhouses as Moldova!
“Our government’s response has been so bad,” Colbert added, that Americans probably won’t be allowed to visit Europe anytime soon. Although, as Colbert pointed out, “forget Europe! At this point I’d settle for a trip to the International House of Pancakes.”
Trevor Noah
And on the Daily Show, Trevor Noah assessed the impact of the pandemic on the global drug trade. In the US, sales and delivery of legal cannabis have soared. “I don’t think I will ever get used to how much the weed game has changed,” said Noah. “Because it used to be some shady dude on the corner. Now, it’s the lady who used to bring orange slices for everyone at half-time.
“You know, it’s going to be real awkward when all those weed dealers who got incarcerated come back home to find their street corners got gentrified,” he said, calling it “Karen’s corner now”.
Legal weed aside, the illegal drug trade around the world has struggled, “because it’s a lot harder to hand people drugs when nobody’s supposed to be touching”, Noah explained, pointing to news clips of drug dealers getting creative with their appearances as joggers or pizza delivery guys.
The international drug trade has also collapsed on several levels, from supply to manufacturing, and in its place, several former drug networks have become supply chains for families in need, at least according to news from Noah’s native South Africa, where gang members were delivering food to families in need. “I don’t know, man – these gangs might want to be careful delivering groceries and hand sanitizer, ’cause that’s Amazon’s turf,” said Noah. “You guys think you’re tough? Wait until you meet Jeff Bezos. A month from now, the Sinaloa cartel is gonna be the Sinaloa Amazon fulfillment center – and there’s no benefits!”