Chris Hayes and Stephen Colbert think Paul Manafort's tax fraud trial implicates Trump

MSNBC's Chris Hayes doesn't understand his fellow journalists who set alerts for President Trump's increasingly frequent tweets, he told Stephen Colbert on Monday's Late Show. "It sometimes feels like we're all pigeons or rats in some stimulus response experiment that he's running," Hayes said. Trump's increasingly frenetic tweetstorms are a sign of fraying nerves, he suggested, but they're also "like bad Jedi mind tricks, where he feels like if he gets in front of you, he can change your mind about something."

Colbert asked Hayes about the just-breaking news of Rick Gates testifying that both he and Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chairman, committed financial crimes. The trial isn't about Trump, but Gates, Trump's deputy campaign chairman, stayed with the Trump campaign through the election, the presidential transition, and then worked on a Trump super PAC, so he's inexorably tied to the Trump administration, Hayes said. And he's the first member of the Trump team "to stand on the stand and say, 'Yes, I am a criminal, I committed crimes, and the president of the United States' campaign manager ... is a criminal, and I know that because me and him did crimes together.'"

"Its strange to even say — do you think this story has legs?" Colbert asked, and they both laughed. "Because he did, over the weekend, admit to collusion, and we're all like, 'Yeah, we know.'" Hayes said yes, he thinks this trial will continue to make news, in part because of the facts yet to emerge. "It's a shady group of people, and at some point, you're best assuming the worst," he said.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

On Late Night, Seth Meyers read the key Gates testimony verbatim. "Oh my God, this whole thing is like a Law & Order episode that ends in the first five minutes," Meyers said. "'Did you do crimes?' 'Yes, I did crimes.'" Cue the theme music. Watch below. Peter Weber