Late night hosts compare Trump's 'heat ray' request to various supervillains, slam his blue state erasure
President Trump said Wednesday that the U.S. coronavirus pandemic isn't that bad — if you remove the blue states. "You can't just not count certain states — that's like eating a salad for lunch, a cheeseburger for dinner, then saying, 'If you don't count the burger, I'm vegan," Jimmy Fallon said on Thursday's Tonight Show. "All this COVID stuff is so depressing, do we have any lighter Trump news?." He did, if you count "heat rays" as "light" and trying to use them on protesters not depressing. "A heat ray?" Fallon asked. "Who are his advisers? A bunch of Minions stacked on top of each other? Even Kim Jong Un was like, 'That's pretty messed up, dude.'"
"Evidently, this heat ray is something the military actually has," and "it can make anyone in range feel like their skin is on fire," Stephen Colbert said on The Late Show. "So rest easy, America: The administration doesn't want turn weapons of war on American citizens, because this weapon is way too dangerous for war."
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Colbert mocked Attorney General William Barr's comparison of coronavirus lockdown orders to slavery and shared Trump's horror (but not his disbelief) that a coronavirus vaccine won't be widely available until next summer. "I've learned how to make sourdough, I've watched everything on Netflix — all that's left is exercise, and you can't make me!" he said. Colbert also explained why Trump's forget-the-blue-states remarks were "unspeakably monstrous."
Trump's "comments aren't just embarrassing and unpatriotic and just gross, they're also wrong," Trevor Noah said at The Daily Show. "Because even if you made the very weird decision to not count deaths from all the blue states, America would still have one of the worst death rates of any country in the world." Michael Kosta suggested granting Trump his wish and making him president of only the red states, and, like Barr, he also had trouble with slavery analogies.
"Just this week we learned that women received unnecessary hysterectomies at an ICE detention facility, the attorney general called for demonstrators to be charged with sedition, and the White House wanted to use a heat ray on peaceful protesters to clear the way for a photo op," Seth Meyers recapped at Late Night. "I think at this point, even Q is an undecided voter." Watch below. Peter Weber
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