Thurs Night Monologues: Executive Out of Order

Donald Trump’s stream of executive orders aimed favorite targets like diversity, transgender people, environmental and financial regulation, and government ethics, left late-night hosts working overtime Thursday night as they attempted to sum up one of the most controversial (and joke-worthy) initial weeks in any administration’s history. Here’s our round-up of the night’s best lines from across the dial.

Seth Meyers

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At the top of a “Closer Look” segment digging into the actions of the first four days of the second Donald Trump administration, Seth Meyers conceded, “Look, I don’t expect any MAGA die-hards to change their minds.”

Nevertheless he persisted, unpacking Trump’s whirlwind of a first week that saw the returning president issue a series of executive orders that ran the gamut from rescinding rules against lower prescription drug prices for seniors and government ethics standards, to outright banning government diversity policies and bans on private prison contracts.

“Hell yeah! Cheaper drug prices are out, private prisons are in! Wooo, America’s back baby! And if you don’t like it, you can go suck and egg. But FYI, the price of eggs is up 38 percent.”

[On Trump threatening to abolish FEMA, telling states to deal with disaster relief themselves] “I mean, fix it yourself, Oklahoma! You had plenty of warning from the song. ‘Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain/and you fix it yourself.'”

[Noting how abolishing FEMA would overwhelmingly impact states that voted for Trump] “The only time you hear the word FEMA in Massachusetts is when a guy named Murph breaks his leg drunk sledding.”

Meyers noted that Trump’s rapid-fire approach to governance (“He’s signing those executive orders like he’s a retired baseball player at a card show,” Meyers observed) has run into a few obstacles, with the president’s decision to issue sweeping pardons to felons who assaulted police officers during their January 6 insurrection drawing pushback from the police union that endorsed him.

[On Trump’s response to a reporter pressing him on specific cases of violent rioters who attacked Capitol Police] “What do you mean you’ll take a look? They’re all out! You’ll be looking at an empty jail cell.”

“This guy ran on stopping violent crime and one of his first acts was releasing felons convicted of violent crime. The message is clear, if you support Trump violence is forgiven. If MS-13 had changed their name to Los Amigos de los Trumpas, they would have been on the dais at the inauguration.”

Meyers also looked back at Trump’s Tuesday attacks on Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde after she delivered a sermon urging the president to show mercy according to the teachings of Jesus.

“All right, first you’re complaining that it was boring? It’s church! You want the bishop to dance to ‘Ave Maria’ with a katana in her hand?” 

“On Trump’s response to calls for mercy and compassion] “This is like holding up a Rorschach test and the patient immediately says, ‘Oh, I know this one. It’s a guy violently strangling another guy and then cutting him up and eating him.’ And you say,’Well, most people say butterfly.'”

Ronny Chieng

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Chieng summed up the strategy behind Trump’s dizzying parade of controversial executive orders, noting, “He’s signing those things like the guys who swipe right on every Tinder profile. ‘Yo, you just need one or two to hit and that’s the weekend, baby!'”

[On Trump setting up a tip line for government workers to report on colleagues violating the new ban on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies] “Yeah, you hear that! Don’t you even think about doing DEI in secret, all right? Don’t be meeting up in back alleys like, ‘Yo, you got any lesbian resumés for me today?'”

[On Trump even repealing anti-discrimination policies signed into law by Lyndon Johnson] “That’s right, Donald Trump went back in time to kill baby DEI.”

“Trump is doing deep dives into these obscure government policies like he’s DEI John Oliver.”

“And I’m not going to pretend to know more about civil rights law than Donald Trump—he’s been sued over it many times.”

Chieng also chimed in on the occasional speed bump in Trump’s headlong rush of executive orders, like the federal judge who called the president’s attempt to undo birthright citizenship “blatantly unconstitutional ” as he put the executive order on hold.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, what does the Constitution have to do with this? The Constitution is for gun stuff.”

“This judge has been judging for four decades and has never seen something so blatantly unconstitutional. I mean, that’s the judge equivalent of a Kendrick diss track. All the other judges were like, ‘Ohhhhh sh*****t, we concur!'”

[On the judge claiming Trump’s order is the least constitutional thing he’s seen in four decades of service] “This is like if you took a pregnancy test and it said, ‘You are the least pregnant anyone’s ever been in 40 years.'”

Chieng also took aim at Trump’s widely-unpopular pardons of the January 6 rioters.

[On a Fox News clip of Trump repeating his claim that other countries were emptying their prisons of violent criminals and dumping them into the United States] “You did that. Like three days ago!”

Taylor Tomlinson

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The After Midnight host, back from a wildfire-related hiatus where she admits the busy news cycle got on top of her, promised her audience a monologue where she’d do “a round-up of some of the smaller, more fun news stories that we might have missed.”

[On Elon Musk being outed for paying people to pretend to break online video gaming records in his name] “He was cheating in order to look better at online gaming. Which is sort of like embezzling money so you can buy yourself a racecar bed.”

“I’d love to tell you more about this story, but I started reading about this game called Path of Exile II and the article mentioned something about account boosting and I just felt my virginity growing back.”

[On Toyota’s announced plan to start building rockets] “Very cool. I did not realize that the moon had farmers markets now.”

[On Breeze, the new dating service that forbids online matches from speaking before their first date] “I think this app could go even further. I’d love a dating app that just jumped straight to restraining order.”

“A 19-year-old woman’s breast size quadrupled after getting the Covid vaccine. The worst part is now she’s more likely to catch Covid because of all the mens’ heavy breathing.”

Stephen Colbert

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Loyal CBS hand Stephen Colbert got out some signature chuckles making fun of his parent company’s programming decisions on Thursday. Specifically, Colbert batted around the new spin-off to the CBS law enforcement drama, FBI, FBI:CIA.

[On the expanding CBS FBI TV universe] “All of those shows are imagineered by CBS television chemists to be the kind of edgy procedural thrillers that Pop-Pop can still follow after the beta blockers kick in.”

[On the new show’s New York setting] “That’s right, FBI:CIA in NYC. Starring Ice-T’s New York cousin, Long Island Ice-T.”

“My only quibble here is that I’m not sure New York City needs more law enforcement, fictional or otherwise. There are already five cops watching me swipe into the subway. Why? I’m 60! There’s already a system in place to prevent me from jumping the turnstile, and it’s not the FBI—it’s the ACL.”

“I cannot wait for all the inter-agency action. ‘FBI, this is CIA, you’re MIA.’ ‘I’m on the FDR from JFK. ‘WTF? ETA?’ ‘TBD. ASAP. Latest, EOD.’ ‘UOK?’ ‘TBD, IDK.’ ‘Y?’ ‘I had a G and T, gotta pee-pee, LOL, BRB.'”

Visibly bummed out, Colbert then announced, “Back in reality it’s day four of the Trump administration, AKA, Four-Loco.” But it wasn’t all doom and gloom, as the host took comfort in the blocking of Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship by a Republican appointed federal judge.

“He described Trump’s order as ‘blatantly unconstitutional.’ And judges rarely talk that bluntly. Except in the landmark case, Marbury v. You Gotta Be Yankin’ My Chain.”

[On the judge noting it “boggled his mind” that “a member of the bar would claim the order was constitutional”] “But to be fair, your honor, some of Trump’s lawyers are members of a slightly different bar.” [Photo of Rudy Giuliani.]

Colbert then moved on to Republicans’ plan to “re-litigate January 6” by forming a new subcommittee to get to the bottom of what the previous January 6 committee famously got to the bottom of. Colbert noted not a little Republican hypocrisy in the move, alongside a particularly embarrassing hiccup in the potential witness list.

[On Republican Congressman Tim Burchett (R-TN) refusing to condemn Trump’s pardon of caught-on-camera violent January 6 convicts by claiming he didn’t know anything about the footage he was being shown on-air] “The only member of Congress with a worse memory is Oklahoma Senator Goldfish-With-a-Head-Injury.”

[On reports that Republicans would not call previous star witness Cassidy Hutchinson out of fears that sexually explicit texts from GOP officials to the former Trump aide would resurface] “Oh yeah, that would not look good for them. [Southern lawmaker voice] Uh, Miss Hutchinson, I refer not to exhibit eight, if you could pull that up out of your file there. A text you received on January fifth reading, and I quote, ‘A-Boooooiiiing!’ And that text was sent to you by Representative… me.'”

“Honestly, I’m surprised anyone in Congress can sexually harass via text. Given how old those guys are, I assume they just rub their junk on a rotary phone.” 

Unlike Elon Musk, who, in a post on his social media app stated he was “sooo tired” of people condemning the Nazi-style salutes he gave at Trump’s inauguration party, Stephen Colbert still had plenty to say about “what we all saw.”

“Yes, Musk is fed up with the Hitler comparisons. He’s had it up to…”

[On Wisconsin meteorologist Sam Kuffel being fired from WDJT in Wisconsin after criticizing Musk’s gestures] “That is terrible. But to be fair, a meteorologist is never supposed to be that accurate.”

Colbert also took on Trump’s interview with Sean Hannity, in which the president made a number of widely disputed claims about the California wildfires.

[On Trump blaming the fires on conservation efforts to save an endangered fish] “‘[Trump voice] And I blame the delta smelt because you know what they say, ‘Whoever smelt-a, dealt-a.'”

[On Trump making some sort of point about wildfires not happening to people who live in forests] “‘I spoke to the forest people. They were wonderful. I spoke to them and asked their opinion and they said, very beautifully they said, ‘I am Groot.'”

Jimmy Kimmel

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The ongoing hardship posed by the still-happening California wildfires has hit Jimmy Kimmel hard. Harder still is the double-whammy that Donald Trump, currently threatening to hold up disaster relief unless the state helps his immigration raids, is coming to Los Angeles on Friday. As Kimmel noted, Trump’s main focus will likely be “to blame us for the fires in person.”

[On Trump’s impeding arrival] “It’s the first time in history that a natural disaster will be visited by an even bigger natural disaster.”

“On one hand, you might think, ‘Oh wow, what a—only a despicable human being would use disaster relief money as a bargaining chip.’ But on the other hand—there is no other hand, it’s just that hand.” 

[On Trump appearing to blame an endangered fish for the wildfires during a Fox News interview] “Great point, Jacques-Off Cousteau.” 

[On the drought that actually contributed to the fires] “For 262 days, this city has been drier than Kanye’s eyes at a screening of Schindler’s List.”

[On news that a new fire has flared up north of Los Angeles] “Which is very L.A.—we’ve already moved onto a younger, hotter fire.”

Being based in Los Angeles, Kimmel was also plugged into Thursday’s Oscar nomination announcements.

[On Best Picture nominee Emilia Pérez] “If you haven’t seen it, it’s basically a musical about if Caitlyn Jenner ran a drug cartel.”

[On Sebastian Stan’s nomination for playing a young Donald Trump] “He’s up for his role in The Apprentice, where he plays the Donald Trump Melania wishes she was married to.” 

“There’s no question we’ve had a devastating month. But we’re slowly getting back to doing what we do best, which is giving awards to movies no one has ever heard of or seen.”

Back to the tumult of Donald Trump’s first days in office, Kimmel went after House Republicans for setting up a subcommittee to investigate the January 6 insurrection, an investigation Kimmel speculated was more about rewriting history and exonerating Donald Trump than about finding the truth already uncovered by the initial January 6 committee.

“In other words, get ready for a whole year of numbskulls trying to convince us that Nancy Pelosi pooped in her own desk.”

[On Republicans’ claim that their goal is to find out “who was really responsible” for the January 6 riot] “We know who is responsible for January 6. He’s in the Oval Office right now playing whac-a-mole with his Diet Coke button.” 

“They’ll probably make it a holiday. From now on, January 6 will be known as National Patriotic Parkour Day.” 

[On the subcommittee being headed by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) who infamously gave a guided tour of the Capitol to a group of eventual insurrectionists the day before the riot) “It’s like putting the Hamburglar in charge of finding out who stole all the Big Macs.”

Jimmy Fallon

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The Tonight Show host, perhaps as exhausted by all the Trump news as much of America, stuck mainly to non-political jokes in his monologue Thursday. Well, okay, he did peek in on Trump’s appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“Trump spoke to a forum in Switzerland and then he signed an executive order changing the name of Swiss cheese to The Cheese of America.”

“In his speech, Trump said that the last 72 hours have been ‘nothing less than a revolution in common sense.’ While everyone at the meeting was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s only been 72 hours?'”

Fallon then moved on to the upcoming 97th Academy Awards, which take place on Sunday, March 2.

[On Wicked received a nomination for Best Picture] “People heard and were like, Yes! A movie that we’ve actually seen!”

I’m Still Here was nominated for Best Picture. It’s the story of Joe Biden’s last six months in office.”

“On Sebastian Stan getting a Best Actor nod for playing Donald Trump in The Apprentice] “You can tell Sebastian’s still in character because he’s already telling people he won.”

Finally, a couple of traditional Fallon monologue corporate punching bags in Starbucks and Spirit Airlines also caught the host’s attention.

“Starbucks is training employees on how to de-escalate conflict with people who want to use the bathroom without buying anything. Yeah that’s who I want to engage with, an angry stranger that desperately needs the bathroom.”

“Starbucks employees were like, ‘Minimum wage, no healthcare, and I get to be the bathroom cop? Awesome!'”

“Spirit Airlines updated their policy on appropriate attire and said that passengers can be kicked off a flight if they’re barefoot, have improper clothing, or offensive tattoos. But if you have all three they’ll let you fly the plane.

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1 Comment

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  1. Michelle Yantis says:

    The hypocrisy of the left on full display. Middle finger to the Constitution, pardoning of friends & family, ignoring the law and rulings of the Supreme Court, targeting of opponents, incompetency in foreign and domestic affairs, and complete lack of concern for a world on fire, threats to social media to carry the torch, and on and on and on….We the people spoke in November as to who excels at that garbage. Those of us in the deplorable and trashy category, don’t care about the press and the progressive liars( Joe Biden was just fine and the border is closed, laptop is fake is one of my favorites) Kudos for the continued negative energy though, really works for the left. What’s that definition of insanity?