Trump’s Back and Late Night’s Not Retreating, But the Battle Lines Have Changed

The renewed President sent a lot of messages in his Inauguration Day address—pardons, tariffs, threats of foreign invasion—and the coverage on television generally came off more moos than news.

As in, a lot of being cowed.

Whom does that leave to take up the beleaguered Resistance fight?

Viewers in the non-MAGA world may have been looking for an answer to that question Monday night after the Inauguration hoopla finally died down. That’s when they could peek out from under the covers they’d pulled over their heads to see if even the big network late-night TV hosts, who had never previously backed down from a confrontation with Donald Trump, had suddenly found their knees buckling.

The answer came in largely defiant jokes lobbed at the venom-breathing dragon, even if couched in awareness that any hopes of inflicting real damage, or even lasting scratches, were flickering.

That message was succinctly summarized at the start of Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue talking about Trump arriving back in power. The sheer madness of what he called “a day that was unimaginable four years ago and is still really hard to get your head around” drove him to throw up his hands and exclaim in loud frustration, “The guy…” Only to interrupt himself, saying, “Ah, never mind.”

The frustration or futility or hint of resignation or whatever it was did not stop the Trump jokes from flowing freely on late-night shows on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Comedy Central. They just came with an unspoken sense that the non-MAGA hosts might be in the process of being cast as Sisyphus with Trump the large round object they had to try to push up and over that hill again.

Not to mention some rueful acknowledgements that the shadow of some form of official retribution might be hanging over them, now and in the future.

After long applause for his introduction Monday, Kimmel began, “You clap too loud, you’re all going to prison too.”

Bill Maher, whose HBO show doesn’t have the sword of broadcast license denials over his head, did a little faux tap dance of conciliation on his last episode before Trump took office. “Look, things have been said,” he began mock apologetically. “What it really is, is some of the writers here, they don’t want to make America great again.”

Seth Meyers on NBC’s Late Night presented a clip where Trump promised to defend free speech against persecution from “political opponents.” Meyers, the most recent late-night target of Trump ire, wiped his brow and said: “Whew! I’ll admit I was worried about the show for a hot second.”

And then, addressing Trump: “Knowing you’re a man of your word, full steam ahead!”

And the steam has mostly on full blast since Monday, with the events in Washington providing no end of material—not that a gift like that was what these hosts had ever asked for.

Stephen Colbert on CBS said he’s frequently approached by friends and strangers who suggest he must be happy because with Trump back “the jokes write themselves.”

Indeed, they started writing themselves right away, as the same jokes appeared on two or more shows, sometimes on the air at the same time: Two mentioned that Melania’s hat made her look like the Hamburglar, two others opted for Carmen San Diego. Two shows noted Trump’s hand not being on the Bible because it would have burst into flame. Three made jokes about how the hat blocking Trump’s attempt to kiss his wife was akin to the border wall.

Both Stewart and Kimmel noted that the way Trump pronounced “decline” made it sound like “dick-line.” Kimmel showed a photo of the tech billionaires standing adjacent to each other and said, “Trump said America’s dick-line is over—and it’s right over there.”

Colbert, of course, did not convey any happiness about the easy jokes because Trump was back. He explained, in a long riff tied to Donald Rumsfeld’s old mantra about Knowns and Unknowns, that it should have contained a fourth level: unknown-knowns. “Things that we know but we choose to unknow. For some reason, and it may a perfectly understandable reason, the American people have chosen to unknow what they definitely knew about Donald Trump. Well, today the great remembering begins.”

On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart, breathing comic fire as usual, described Trump as “a man whose licentious and felonious behavior has been well catalogued and documented returned to the Capitol Rotunda just four short years after inspiring a day of notorious sh*t-f*ckery.”

Colbert, referring to Trump’s decision to bring the Inauguration indoors, called him a “weather cuck.”

Meyers mocked Trump’s threats to attack Panama over the Canal and Denmark over Greenland as the equivalent of a college football power scheduling cupcakes to beat up on. “Like if Alabama scheduled a game vs the Savannah School of Art and Design.”  

The Tonight Show‘s Jimmy Fallon said, “America is rolling the dice on a second Trump presidency. It’s like we somehow survived the first Squid Game and then signed back up for a second.”

Stewart scored an enormous laugh commenting on Mike Pence entering the Capitol. “Even Mike Pence showed up. I guess to let the crowd finish the job.”

Of course, his audience and those of Kimmel, Colbert and Meyers are all more or less pre-disposed to find Trump appalling, even as they laugh at him.

But there was an interesting development on Fallon’s show. His first mention of Trump being sworn in drew a predictable round of boos, but they were immediately smothered by a round of cheers.

Fallon’s less caustic approach to joking about Trump may have made his show feel more hospitable to the President’s crowd, but the cheers outside the conservative media universe still sounded surprising, and they seemed to grow as the Trump supporters realized they had company.

More than that one moment has signaled a shift away from the pitched comedy battle of Trump’s first term. At that point he was, for the hosts, a mostly buffoonish, freak winner of the Presidency with support of only a minority of the public.

The second time around he is something else: a cartoon villain maybe, but one with a dangerous bite. Make no mistake: the battle has been rejoined, with the hosts committed to keeping up the fire, but maybe from a greater distance, dug into the trenches, expecting a long and brutal fight.

1 Comment

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  1. Elizabeth E. D. Dewey says:

    Thank you for making us feel we aren’t alone as we cower from the emerging brown shirts.