Mon Night Monologues: Inaugurating Chaos

Donald Trump’s second inauguration was everyone’s top topic on Monday, whether they liked it or not. (They did not.) Here’s our round-up of the night’s best lines from across the dial.

Seth Meyers

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On this, the inauguration day of Donald Trump, Seth Meyers did a lot of accent work, goofing on other countries’ predicted response to the already announced raft of unilateral assaults on their sovereignty with impressions of, among others, the Swedish Chef. “Look, we gotta get through the next four years somehow,” an animated Meyers told his audience.

For most of Monday’s hosts, tonight’s monologues were a similar exercise in easing into four more years of attempting to process the daily chaos of a Trump administration into something like comedy.

Kicking off his “A Closer Look” segment with a series of fake-outs about the big news of the day (Taylor Swift palling around with Caitlin Clark, Timothée Chalamet getting a bicycle ticket in London), Meyers finally forced himself to confront reality, noting, “Oh sh*t, right, Donald Trump’s now the president of the United States. F*ck me.”

Meyers circled in on one telling inauguration day event, as Trump’s sudden choice to move the event indoors left hundreds of not-billionaire supporters literally out in the cold and out of pocket for travel and lodging expenses while he was sworn alongside his equally toasty oligarch pals. After introducing a new segment he called “Do I really have to explain the metaphor here?,” Meyers let Trump’s abandonment of his die-hard voting base breathe, noting, “Most of the next four years is gonna be me showing clips and then going [gesturing impatiently to see if viewers have figured it out yet.]”

Calling Trump’s first speech in office “an unsettling, low-energy mix of ominous fascism and weird sh*t that no one except Donald Trump and his minions even care about,” Meyers mocked Trump’s plans to militarily attack such world powerhouses as Panama and Greenland, noting, “It’s easy to make America win again when you’re only scheduling cupcakes. This is like if Alabama scheduled a game against the Savannah College of Art and Design.”

Meyers also criticized Democrats in attendance for pretending that all this is normal after “rightly accusing Trump of being an existential threat to democracy.” Playing a clip of outgoing President Biden giving the arriving Trump a friendly, “Welcome home,” Meyers said it sounded less like a defiant defender of democracy making a stand and more “like the greeting to an 18 year old back from his first semester in college.”

Back to Trump’s speech, Meyers finally addressed directly Trump’s completely un-veiled recent threat to retaliate against him personally and his corporate parents politically by pointing to Trump’s mid-speech promise that the federal government would never, ever stand for retaliation against anyone for exercising their right to free speech. “Whew,” Meyers exhaled exaggeratedly, “Because I’ll admit I was worried about this show for a hot second.”

Jon Stewart

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In fairness to hosts like Jon Stewart, there was an ungodly amount of news to cover from the inauguration. So viewers might cut Stewart a little slack for—after solemnly calling this “a tumultuous time in American history, filled with much uncertainty and trepidation”—spending a full minute mocking Trump for pronouncing “decline” as “dickline” in his speech. You have to find your laughs where you can.

Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games, as Stewart, like Meyers and others, chided Democrats for showing up and peacefully “handing over the keys” to a former president who literally tried to overthrow democracy. Noting that Joe Biden invited Trump for pre-inauguration tea, Stewart noted that, while nobody’s saying the outgoing president should have thrown his own insurrection, “There’s got to be a happy medium between storming the Capitol and ‘Would you like a crumpet?'” He gave credit to former First Lady Michelle Obama for pulling a pointed no-show, describing Mrs. Obama’s “consistent ethical stance” against Donald Trump as “When they go low, I stay the f*ck home.”

Of the people who did have front row seats to this re-installment, Stewart mocked the billionaire tech CEOs who ponied up millions to “kiss the ass” of the new president, calling the leaders of Google, Meta, Twitter, TikTok, and Apple, “six guys who control 20 percent of the world’s wealth and 100 percent of your nudes.” He also expressed surprise that the group would be meeting at the inauguration instead of “in a volcano lair near Zurich.”

One of those “Lex Luthor”-esque CEOs got special attention from Stewart, however. Playing the first half of the clip of Elon Musk praising Trump while making what sure looked to be an emphatic Nazi salute, Stewart did his best impression of giving the benefit of the doubt, suggesting that maybe an out-of-touch Musk was just really bad at dabbing. Then he played the second half in which Musk—who has praised Germany’s far-right AfD party, among other global fascists—did the same exact thing a second time. “Son of a b*tch!,” Stewart blurted.

It was what Stewart called “a f*cking nerve-wracking day” overall, something that yet saw the host suggesting that it was merely the beginning of a lot of such days. Noting how, in fear of Trump’s political retribution, Biden had issued literal last-minute pardons to his entire family, Stewart lambasted Trump and Biden’s transfer of power as “a snake sucking its own d*ck cycle of no accountability.”

Stephen Colbert

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“Where do you begin?,” was the question on Stephen Colbert’s mind as he kicked of an extended two-part monologue Monday night. Positing that willful amnesia may be the root cause of Donald Trump’s reelection by speculating that voters made their choice based on “things that we know but that we choose to un-know for some reason,” Colbert did have one thing he knew for certain. Calling “airport rules” for the next four years, Colbert stated that, “calories don’t count and it’s perfectly reasonable to have a vodka tonic at 8 a.m.”

Colbert segued into the jokes about Trump’s defensive announcement that he was moving his inauguration inside because of the cold (“You weather cuck!,” Colbert taunted Trump on his own level after a round of mocking baby talk), and Melania’s outfit. The defensive perimeter of her hat was cited as having “the same sanitary function as a sneeze guard at the salad bar,” while her overall outfit saw Colbert exclaiming that we’ve finally found Carmen Sandiego.

Perhaps sensing that will be plenty of serious days ahead, Colbert amused himself by mocking the fact that Trump didn’t put his hand on the bible during his swearing-in, suggesting that the fire marshal nixed it once the ceremony moved indoors. (Because demons burst into flame around holy stuff. You get it.) Colbert also speculated that Trump’s perfunctory reference to Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech referred to invading Greenland.

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Returning from commercial, Colbert told his audience there was “too much monologue for one act,” as he dug into Joe Biden’s last-minute pardons for the January 6 investigators, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Biden’s own family. Echoing at least two of his Monday colleagues, Colbert anticipated the hard, unconstitutional vengeance from Trump to come by noting that he will henceforth be known as “Sarah Jones Biden” for pardon purposes.

Moving on to the TikTok ban that only lasted 14 hours despite Congress and then the Supreme Court mandating it, Colbert put up a screenshot of the fawning message to Trump on the video app’s temporary landing page, calling the move, “a pathetic, transparent ploy to suck up to Trump that completely worked.” Terming the half-day shutdown as “the most productive 14 hours in American history,” Colbert then attempted to sum up the reasons behind the flip-flop from Trump, who was the one who led the charge to ban the popular app in the first place. “The explanation is pretty complicated,” Colbert began, “he has no sincerely held beliefs and… it wasn’t that complicated.”

Speaking of pre-presidential shadiness, Colbert also addressed “the griftiest grift he has ever grifted,” referring to Trump’s quickly marketed cryptocurrency, which netted the incoming leader some $70 billion before losing half its value the next day (along with the investment of many gullible MAGA supporters.) Pointing to Trump’s manufactured windfall and the roster of CEOs invited to take the place of elected officials on the inauguration dais, Colbert marveled, “That is so much money it’s almost enough to have gotten a seat behind himself at his own inauguration.”

Jimmy Kimmel

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As is his wont, Jimmy Kimmel had a series of blunt takes on Trump’s second inauguration day, although even the outspoken host started out sounding defeated by the sheer volume of outrages. “This guy!,” Kimmel exclaimed angrily before trailing off, “Aw, never mind.”

Sadly for the Jimmy Kimmel Live! host, monologues never take a Monday through Thursday off, so he first went through the more easily mock-able aspects of the inauguration. On Melania Trump’s icy “Goth Al Capone” outfit, Kimmel noted how her sharp-edged hat kept her husband from “mess[ing] up his makeup” with a kiss, and suggested that the shift to an inside swearing-in was the only thing keeping the estranged First Lady from making a break for it.

Like Jon Stewart, Kimmel couldn’t resist mocking Trump’s mispronunciation of the phrase “America’s decline,” putting up a picture of a smiling Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos and calling them “America’s dickline, right over there.” Kimmel, too, roasted Democrats for making nice with the man they’d been campaigning against as a fascist threat to democracy, although he also noted how, unlike her husband Mike, Karen Pence chose not to attend. Speculating it’s because she “opted not to celebrate the man who was all good with a a bunch of yahoos killing her husband,” Kimmel could only marvel that the subservient former Vice President looks like “the fun one” in the relationship.

Kimmel pointed to some of the executive orders Trump has already signed, including renaming the Gulf of Mexico, renaming Mt. Denali back to Mt. McKinley, and, according to Kimmel, “renaming Melania Ivanka.” Kimmel also called out Trump for pardoning some 1,500 convicted and imprisoned Capitol rioters, claiming the difference between Biden pardoning his family and others targeted for unjustified retribution and Trump’s sweeping pardon of his co-conspirators, “Biden pardoned a bunch of people who didn’t commit crimes, Trump pardoned people who did.” Taking Seth Meyers’ cue, he also lamented the fact that Biden didn’t pardon any talk show hosts on his way out the door.

Jimmy Fallon

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The Tonight Show host set the tone of his inauguration jokes by emerging onstage in a replica of the wide-brimmed hat worn by Melania Trump for the big day, asking “Who wore it best, me, Melania, or the Hamburglar?” Showing a clip of said hat effectively keeping Donald from getting anywhere close to her lips for a kiss, Fallon joked, “It’s not just a hat, it’s Melania’s very own border wall.”

Referring to the country “rolling the dice on a second Trump presidency,” Fallon noted, “It’s like we somehow survived the first Squid Game and then signed back up for a second.” As for Trump’s stated goal of “planting a flag on Mars” during his term, Fallon suggested the secondary goal was “to return Elon Musk to his home planet.”

The brief TikTok outage over the weekend was up next, with Fallon saying of the 14-hour blackout, “millions of parents saw their children’s eyeballs for the first time.”

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