Late Night Tackles Trump and impeachment
Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers agree with Trump that Ukraine is just the tip of his impeachment iceberg
"Today, the House Judiciary Committee debated whether to send two articles of impeachment to the House floor, but first they spent hours proposing highly specific and asinine amendments," Stephen Colbert said on Thursday's Late Show, pointing to one in particular by "human-hangover hybrid" Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) targeting Hunter Biden and mentioning his history of drug use. "It's pretty ballsy for a congressman to bring that up when he was arrested for DUI in 2008," Colbert said. "Now, you might not have known that — but Georgia's Hank Johnson did," and slyly hammered Gaetz with it in "a master class in passive-aggressiveness."
Assuming Trump is impeached, the Senate trial will apparently last two weeks in January and have no witnesses. "Now, the president's putting a brave face on in public, but impeachment seems to be getting to Trump," Colbert said. But "it's not just impeachment that's getting on Trump's nerves, it's why he's being impeached," he added, quoting a Trump adviser who told CNN the president is "a little surprised it's the Ukraine thing that's done it.
Colbert agreed: "After all the shady deals he's been involved in over the years, he gets tripped up by a phone call? Trump getting impeached for Ukraine is like Paul Newman winning an Oscar for The Color of Money: He definitely deserves it, but it should have happened way before this."
"For three years, this moment has somehow felt both inevitable and also impossible at the same time," Seth Meyers said on Late Night. He called Trump's reported surprise that it's the Ukraine affair that will get him impeached "an amazing confession. Think about that: That's like getting pulled over for a broken tail light and saying: 'Tail light? I got, like, 10 dead bodies in my trunk!'"
"Usually, Republicans are able to dodge questions about all this by hiding in elevators," Meyers said, but "one of the many reasons these public impeachment hearings have been so valuable" is that "Republicans have been forced to sit there and confront the evidence in plain sight, and we've all been able to see in real time that they have no defense." Watch below. Peter Weber