Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O'Brien groan over Trump's unsolicited Notre Dame advice. Seth Meyers hits taxes.

Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Kimmel mock Trump's Notre Dame advice
(Image credit: Screenshots/YouTube/Conan, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Late Night)

The iconic Notre Dame cathedral burned in Paris on Monday. "Just colossal damage, and a lot of people are talking about it — and you know if people are talking about something, you know what that means: President Trump just had to tweet about it," Conan O'Brien said on Monday's Conan. He read what he assured everyone was Trump's "real tweet," suggesting France deploy "flying water tankers" and "act quickly!"

France explicitly rejected Trump's water-tanker idea, but "we're all grateful to the president that in a case of fire, water and acting quickly might be a good idea," Conan deadpanned. He imagined what else Trump might have plausibly tweeted.

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Jimmy Kimmel was equally unimpressed with Trump's "practical advice to the people of France" on Kimmel Live. "I'm glad someone was thinking quickly enough to tell them to act quickly," he joked wryly, pivoting to Trump praising Tiger Woods and then Tax Day: "We still haven't seen the president's taxes, of course, and there's apparently a very good reason for that."

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Trump knows his excuse about being audited is "a transparent lie," Seth Meyers explained on Late Night, so he's "moved on to a new excuse, that his tax returns are too complicated for people to understand." And White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, he noted, just "took Trump's argument one step further, saying members of Congress were literally too dumb to understand them."

"I will concede, if Sanders is talking about the Republican members of Congress, then yes, some of them are not smart enough to understand Trump's tax returns," Meyers said, showing examples, but some of the Democrats are clearly up to the task. It doesn't matter, though, because "the law is clear: Democrats have the power to request Trump's tax returns, which they did, and the request went to the IRS, not Trump — it's not up to him." Watch below. Peter Weber

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Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.