The details of John Bolton's last days as President Trump's third national security adviser are fuzzy, Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday's Late Show, "so this afternoon, Donald Trump called reporters into the Oval Office set the record straight."
"Right off the bat," Colbert said, "Trump made it clear that he was no fan of John Bolton," dismissing him as a "tough guy" who pushed American into Iraq and also revealing "that he was mad at Bolton for angering one of Trump's closest advisers, Kim Jong Un." Still, Trump "made one not-bad announcement," too, that the FDA is banning flavored e-cigarettes — though when crediting first lady Melania Trump for the policy, Trump had an odd slip about their son, Barron.
"She's got a son — ehm, together?" Jimmy Kimmel repeated on Kimmel Live, laughing. But Trump and his wife want to ban flavored e-cigarettes "to protect children from being harmed or killed — and I think that's good, I'm fine with that," he added. "Hey, you know what else harms and kills children? Assault rifles do. ... Maybe if the NRA starts flavoring those, you'll ban them, too."
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Kimmel noted that Trump spent the morning of 9/11 rage-tweeting about the Fed and "fake" polls, before threatening the 9/11 perpetrators with a mysterious terrible weapon if they come back. "By the way, those terrorists he's warning not to come back, I wonder if they're the same ones he just invited over for s'mores at Camp David?" he asked. Kimmel played Trump slamming Bolton for being a warmonger, shrugging: "Sounds like a real dope. Who hired that guy? I mean, whoever did that must be an idiot."
"It was always terrifying knowing an extremist neocon like Bolton had the ear of an impressionable president who had no idea what he was doing and who took his advice from TV pundits," Seth Meyers said at Late Night. Along with "insisting that he was tougher than Bolton" on Wednesday, Trump "also specifically and repeatedly went out of his way to criticize Bolton for his role in the Iraq War," among other blunders. "If you knew all that then, why did you hire him in the first place?" Meyers asked. "This is like firing someone for embezzlement when they had 'Embezzlement' under Special Skills on their résumé." Watch below. Peter Weber
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