Colbert on post-midterm Republicans: ‘Coming together to pick a scapegoat’
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert breathed a sigh of relief on Monday evening at news that Democrats would keep control of the Senate following Catherine Cortez Masto’s victory in Nevada. “Ah, turns out that ‘red wave’ was actually a blue splash, just as the maxi pad commercials foretold,” the Late Show host joked.
Cortez Masto’s win means the Georgia runoff election will not determine control of the Senate, “so Georgians will have to come up with a new reason to vote for Herschel Walker”, Colbert said. “For many of them, it will be, ‘he’s my dad!’”
After a disappointing midterms performance, Republicans are “rolling up their sleeves and coming together to pick a scapegoat and hurl them down an elevator shaft”, Colbert said. “Right now, knives are out for Senate minority leader and clinically depressed pudding Mitch McConnell” and the Florida senator Rick Scott.
“Republican candidates are mad at
McConnell for not telling the voters what the GOP would do if they got control of the Senate,” Colbert explained. “And they’re madder at Rick Scott for telling voters what they would do if they got control of the Senate.” Specifically,
Scott discussed cutting social security and Medicare, which probably scared older voters.
“Most shocking of all, some of the GOP blame is going to the person who actually deserves it,” Colbert added. That would be Donald Trump, whom one Republican strategist blamed for picking conspiracists to run for office, saying: “The MyPillow-ization of the GOP has been a disaster.”
“To which Mike Lindell responded: use promo code ‘GOP-Disaster for 20% your next pillow sham!” Colbert joked.
Trevor Noah
On the Daily Show, Trevor Noah also celebrated Democratic control of the Senate. “But remember, if Republicans take control of the House, then every dream the Democrats have of codifying Roe v Wade or taxing the rich or turning Pete Buttigieg into a real boy – they can’t do it,” he said. “I mean, they probably weren’t going to do it anyway, but now they have someone to blame.”
Still, though Democrats no longer need Raphael Warnock’s victory over Herschel Walker in Georgia, “it would give them an extra cushion for when Joe Manchin tries to cockblock them, or Kyrsten Sinema goes rogue, or Bernie Sanders misses a vote because he’s arguing with a grocery store manager.
“But can we just admit, now that the stakes are a little lower, you kinda want to see what Herschel Walker would be like as a senator,” Noah riffed. “I’m not saying they should, and I’m not saying it would be good for Georgia or the country, but when he gets Mitch McConnell pregnant with another secret baby? It’ll be all worth it!”
Seth Meyers
After a disappointing midterms performance, “Republicans are furiously pointing fingers at each other
looking for someone to blame,” said Seth Meyers on Late Night, “and honestly it’s kinda fun to watch.”
The Alabama senator Mo Brooks, a loyal Trump follower, said last week that the ex-president was “dishonest, disloyal, incompetent, crude” – “which is true, but Trump didn’t prove that last week”, Meyers said. “It’s just last week, there were consequences.
“It’s so great to watch these assholes turn on each other,” he added. “They’re like a bunch of roommates who got a pet cougar and now they’re all like ‘has anyone seen Dave?’
“Predictably with the GOP turning on him, Trump is lashing out with a series of absolutely insane and typo-riddled social media posts,” Meyers noted. On Truth Social, Trump wrote that Arizona “stole the Electron” from the GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters, who lost to the Democratic incumbent, Mark Kelly.
“How is it possible that he typed electron instead of election?” Meyers wondered. “I would say that maybe Trump got screwed by auto-correct on that one, but then is it really possible that Trump’s autocorrect hasn’t learned the word election? It’s literally all he tweets about.”
Jimmy Kimmel
“It was an emotional weekend for Trump, because he gave away a daughter and the Senate on the same night,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Monday evening, referring to the Mar-a-Lago wedding of Trump’s daughter Tiffany over the weekend. “Many of the candidates Trump endorsed wound up losing,” he continued. “Everything Trump touches dies, which explains why Melania will live forever.”
Many expect Trump to announce his campaign for 2024 on Tuesday evening, but “not too many of his fellow Republicans seem that jazzed about it,” Kimmel noted. “They tried to get him to delay the announcement; he said no. Many of them blame Trump for what happened in the midterms and see him as a liability going forward. But you know, we’ve heard this before. The question now is: are Republicans finally ready to break away from Donald Trump for good?”
It seems the answer is no for Mike Pence, whose memoir debuts on the same day as Trump’s expected announcement. ABC aired an hour-long interview with Pence on Monday evening in which the former vice-president played down the threat to his life on January 6 – “take that, Monday Night Football,” Kimmel joked. “It was two hours of Bachelor in Paradise and then an hour of Mike Pence. It’s like herpes in the hot tub and then bleaching it out.
“Only Mike Pence could take a story where he almost got hung by a mob of insurrectionists and make it read like dishwasher instruction manual,” he added.