Late Night Tackles Trump and Hate Crimes
Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Trevor Noah are pretty comfortable calling Trump anti-Muslim, at least
After Friday's terrorist attack by a white supremacist on two mosques in New Zealand, President Trump phoned his condolences to New Zealand's prime minister, but expressing "sympathy and love for all Muslim communities," as she asked, is "not really Trump's brand," Stephen Colbert said on Monday's Late Show. "On the one hand, after a terror attack, to condemn the extremist ideology of the terrorist should be a slam dunk. On the other hand, he can't jump. Also, he never, ever condemns the racists."
Colbert listed some of Trump's past words and actions. "I'm just saying if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then why does it goose-stepping?" he asked. White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney spent much of Sunday on TV insisting Trump is not a white supremacist, saying at one point, "I don't think anybody could say that the president is anti-Muslim." Colbert accepted the challenge: "The president is anti-Muslim. What did I win?"
"The president is anti-Muslim — yep, that was not hard at all," Seth Meyers agreed on Late Night. "Trump's aides have been trying to memory-hole his long history of racism and Islamophobia," but "asking Trump if he sees white nationalism as a threat is like asking Joe Camel if he sees tobacco as a threat." He also agreed with George Conway's diagnosis of Trump's weekend tweets, saying they "would make more sense if they were scribbled on the wall of a psych ward."
On The Daily Show, Trevor Noah said he doesn't blame Trump for the New Zealand shooting, exactly. Just like "I don't think you can pin any one storm on directly on climate change," he said, "I don't think he's the cause of any of these things, but he does in some ways raise the temperature enough that we'll see more of these things happening." And Trump and the New Zealand shooter "are products of the same white supremacy, they believe the same things," Noah said. Watch below. Peter Weber