Late night hosts delight in watching Lindsey Graham call Trump 'an enormous douche'

(Image credit: Screenshots/YouTube/The Late Show, The Tonight Show, Full Frontal, Jimmy Kimmel Live)

published 12 December 2019

President Trump has "moved on to a new phase of his ever-changing defense of the indefensible, and that is: Yes, I'm being impeached, but not, like, impeached impeached," Jimmy Kimmel said on Wednesdays Kimmel Live, unpersuaded. "No, it's exactly like an impeachment. ... You are about to get impeached."

But back in Congress, "once again today, Republicans lined up to win the president's love, one in particular," Kimmel said. In a Senate hearing on the Justice Department inspector general's FBI report, "Lindsey Graham put on quite a show." After role-playing "saucy text messages" between two FBI agents — including, memorably: "Wow, Donald Trump is an enormous douche" — Graham "took his performance to heights previously unseen in the Senate," Kimmel laughed. "Has anyone ever mentioned a 'golden shower' in Congress before? I don't think so." He then played not-that-old clips of Graham absolutely trashing Trump.

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"I can understand why Graham is furious — not only is that overt bias by FBI agents, they're stealing Graham's best material," Stephen Colbert said at The Late Show. He also contrasted Graham's greatest hits of 2016 with his Trump sycophancy of 2019. "Will the last vertebrae to leave Lindsey Graham's spine please remember to turn off the lights?" he asked, moving on to other Republicans eager to sacrifice their reputation to Trump's defense.

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"Congressional Republicans have decided that the best defense is a really loud offense," Samantha Bee said on Full Frontal. "I have a name for this strategy — it's called Kava-Noise. That's when white men who've done something awful shout into a camera at us until it goes away," and "the really disturbing thing about this strategy is that it kind of works."

The DOJ report at the center of Thursday's Senate hearing "actually exonerates the FBI of political bias," Bee said. "While there were two agents criticizing Trump via text, there were also pro-Trump agents texting their support for him. Guess which texts Lindsey Graham did a dramatic reading of?" She suggested "he's probably going to regret" this performance, savoring the "enormous douche" comment in particular: "I cannot wait to take that out of context for the next 100 years."

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After hearing Graham read the text messages, "every Democrats was like, 'I allot my time to Lindsey Graham,'" Jimmy Fallon joked at The Tonight Show. He also mashed up the impeachment debate with Santa Con, the cheating New England Patriots, and KFC-scented logs. Watch below. Peter Weber

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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.