Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Seth Meyers ponder Trump's positively negative word salad, mask timidity

(Image credit: Screenshots/Twitter/YouTube/The Late Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Late Night)

published 22 May 2020

"The great state of Michigan is grappling with a series of disasters right now: record unemployment, coronavirus, flooding, and today, a visit from Donald Trump," Stephen Colbert said on Thursday's Late Show. Trump was visiting a Ford plant, and despite the company and Michigan's attorney general asking him to wear a mask, he did not — at least not in front of the media.

"Now, any president can be an idiot, but here's where Donald Trump just takes it to the next level: He was answering questions about not wearing masks in front of a sign about how that factory was making masks," Colbert said. Trump went on to shrug off a second wave of COVID-19 and recount, yet again, the fable of his "Michigan Man of the Year" award. And earlier in the day, he added, "Trump talked about his COVID test results in the most confusing way possible."

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"Even his negatives are positive — isn't that something?" Jimmy Kimmel marveled. Trump's muddled answer followed his update on hydroxycholroquine, and "it's pretty clear what's going on here, right? He blurted out that he was taking it just to trigger the news media — successfully, by the way — even though there's no way in hell he's taking this stuff. You think any White House doctor, even a Trump doctor, is gonna give the president a pill that could stop his heart, just because he asked for it?"

Of course Trump didn't wear a mask in front of the cameras, Late Night's Seth Meyers said. "Widespread mask-wearing — along with testing, contract tracing, and isolation — is one of the few simple measures that could very possibly help us get back to some semblance of normalcy, and yet conservatives have decided to turn it into yet another dumb culture war issue. Some have even theorized that it's a media conspiracy to keep people permanently afraid." Watch his anagram-filled closer look at coronavirus studies, Trump's war on mail-in voting, and the GOP's "insane conspiracy theories" 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.

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