Late night hosts squeeze some dark humor out of Trump's historic 2nd impeachment
"The big story today is that the House voted to impeach President Trump for a second time," Jimmy Fallon said on Wednesday's Tonight Show. "It's honestly impressive: Trump got impeached December 2019 and January 2021, and botched COVID in between. Dude basically made a pandemic sandwich with impeachment bread." And "what made today's impeachment different than the first one is that it had bipartisan support," he said. "Yeah, 10 Republicans finally broke away from the president. Trump was so mad he started typing angry tweets about them on a calculator."
"I feel like I just took down my decorations from the last impeachment," Stephen Colbert joked at The Late Show. During the impeachment debate, "Republicans, for the most part, talked about how the president's followers attacking to keep him in power is bad, but it's not that bad," he said, running through both their arguments and also what the 10 impeaching Republicans had to say, ending with the big one: "That's how awful this president is! He has made me grateful to Liz Cheney! Can we impeach him for that?"
"Whatever they've said and done to support him in the past, I do want to commend those Republicans in the House who voted to hold Trump accountable," Jimmy Kimmel said on Kimmel Live. "It's not just a political risk, these Trump nuts will come to their house. But the rest of them? Crazy town. "Pushing this idea that the attack on the Capitol last week bore any resemblance to the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer, it's not just dumb, it's disgusting," Kimmel said. "Stop comparing protesters marching to protect their rights with anarchists storming an election to strip us of ours. Stop it, you sound stupid." And was not impressed with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's late effort to wash Trump out of his hair.
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"Of course McConnell is pleased" with Trump's impeachment, Late Night's Seth Meyer said. "He's like a guy who robbed a bank, jumped on a helicopter to Fiji, and pulled up the rope ladder, leaving his accomplice stranded on the roof as the cops close in." Whatever happens in the Senate, he added. Trump will forever be "the only president to be impeached twice — in fact it's worse than that, he's the only president to be impeached twice and lose the popular vote twice. He'll be emblazoned in history as an embarrassment and disgrace." Watch him turn that into a Trivial Pursuit question 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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