Missed Thursday’s late-night monologues? We’ve got you covered with our round-up of the night’s best laughs from across the dial.
Into the [Insert Lazy Animal Metaphor Here]
The idea of a presidential candidate sitting down for a toe-to-toe interview with an actual journalist not beholden to one ideological camp is so rare that this week’s interviews with Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were themselves newsworthy. Even if talking heads in the media couldn’t find more original descriptors than each candidate “going into the lion’s den”—c’mon, have some writing pride. (At least Stephen Colbert tried out a different mammal in tonight’s monologue.)
Kamala Harris went on right-wing propaganda outlet Fox News for a sit-down with that network’s “real news” guy Bret Baier, while Donald Trump did an actual town hall not packed with pre-screened conservative activists at Spanish language outlet Univision. And the results were as strikingly different as they were predictable.
A caught-lying Baier played unsuccessful gotcha games trying to get Harris to give this election’s version of “basket of deplorables” and asked the Vice President to respond to a clumsily edited clip that made it look like Trump didn’t just call for his political opponents and their supporters to be rounded up by a Trump-loyal military. (Harris shut that sh*t down good, while Baier has since pretended that the edited clip was just a little “whoopsie” on Fox’s part.) Meanwhile, Baier disrespectfully attempted to steamroll Harris by never allowing her to finish a sentence—at one point accusingly saying “we’re talking over each other,” when he was the one with the “Don’t let the Black woman talk” game plan. It was a mess, albeit one that the Democratic candidate was prepared for.
“Now Kamala’s lion’s den was Fox News, where she sat down with Bret Baier, so maybe it was a Baier’s den? It doesn’t matter what animal it was, the point is it was very tense.”
desi lydic
“Yesterday, Kamala Harris entered the belly of the beast and then cut herself out with a rusty spoon in an interview with Fox News anchor and Botox that’s had some man done, Bret Baier.”
stephen colbert
“Yes, both Kamala and Trump went into the lion’s den this week. Although they only got Trump there by telling him it was the name of a strip club.”
desi lydic
“I want to be clear about this. I believe that journalists should always ask the toughest questions of presidential candidates, and Bret Baier certainly plays a convincing journalist on Fox News.”
stephen colbert
[On Baier’s November 5, 2020 email urging his Fox masters to reverse their call that Joe Biden won Nevada because defending it was making him “uncomfortable”] “But as we learned in the aftermath of the Dominion suit against Fox, when the rubber hits the road, Bret’s ready to throw the journalism under the bus.”
stephen colbert
“Sorry, can we get that mute button from the debate so she can complete a sentence?”
desi lydic
“Yeah. You ask a question, you have to let her answer. Does he think he’s interviewing himself? ‘Your hair is looking particular snapped-on today, Bret.’ ‘Why thank you, Bret.’ ‘My pleasure, Bret.’ ‘Who’s that lady talking over there?’ ‘I’m Kamala Harris.’ ‘Excuse me, I was talking to Bret.’ You scratch her eyes out, Bret.'”
stephen colbert
“C’mon Bret, you invited her on to speak with you. This is an interview with the Vice President, not sex with your wife. You have to let the woman finish.”
desi lydic
“The whole quote makes it a little different, doesn’t it buddy? Though without the whole quote it sounds relatively sane. It’s like if you only watch the first ten minutes of Jurassic Park you think, ‘That place looks like a lot of fun. Tell you what, let’s load up the kids in the Land Rover, stuff their pockets with goat meat and go throw rocks at the T-Rex.'”
stephen colbert
[On Baier playing the clip that makes Trump sound slightly less like a Putin-wannabe dictator ready to sic the military on political dissidents] “She’s right, he did not show what he was talking about. Though in his defense, maybe he couldn’t see the clips because his eyes are two dehydrated blueberries.”
stephen colbert
[On Baier failing to get his sound bite when Harris wouldn’t call Trump supporters “stupid”] “C’mon Bret, that was such an obvious trap. ‘Now Madame Vice President, just put on this ‘I’m With Stupid’ t-shirt and stand next to this map of the United States.”
desi lydic
“No they’re not stupid, Bret. They’ve just been watching your network and your network feeds them lies. It’s like Taco Bell asking, ‘Why do all these people have diarrhea?’ It’s you guys! You’re the diarrhea factory!”
stephen colbert
“‘Why are these people junkies? All we do is feed them heroin.'”
stephen colbert
It Was—How You Say?—Not Good
For his part, Trump’s trip in front of an audience who he’s been slandering while racist pandering to base went… significantly worse. As Desi Lydic put it of the beyond-patient facial expressions of the people who had to sit through Trump’s non-answers and lies, “The whole audience was one big reaction GIF.”
In fact, by putting respectful, thoughtful questions to a candidate known for never telling the truth and then holding Trump to account with both deeply unimpressed facial reactions and skeptical follow-up questions, the Univision citizen interviewers wound up putting the perennially softball-lobbing mainstream media to shame. Trump, meanwhile, has responded to his public embarrassment there by cancelling essentially all previously scheduled interviews and appearances—even one with the NRA, which should tell you just how much confidence his handlers have in his ability not to provoke mocking looks from everyone he talks to. (To be fair, the NRA thing may have something to do with that gun-totin’ organization’s CEO being caught up in a cat-murdering scandal.)
As Stephen Colbert enlisted one of his Spanish-speaking writers Felipe Torres Medina to help him translate, Trump “crapped the bed.”
“So that was Kamala’s experience in the lion’s den, an interview with a news network that openly serves as the propaganda arm of her opponent. But Trump also faced down his biggest fear—Hispanic people.”
desi lydic
[After a clip showed Trump freezing and weaving in place while the Univision announcer greeted the audience in Spanish] “I’d like to point out that that there is no difference between his nervous swaying to Spanish and his dancing to ‘Ave Maria.’“
stephen colbert
“For most of this campaign, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have stuck to doing friendly interviews. Kamala Harris has gone on MSNBC and The View, and Donald Trump has gone on outlets favorable to him, like Newsmax and the No Fatties podcast with the Roofie Bros, sponsored by creatine.”
desi lydic
“He’s cancelled a number of high-profile television appearances in favor of cozy, friendly chats with the wannabe Bro Rogans of the podcasting world.”
jimmy kimmel
[On one questioner’s now widely-memed reaction shot after Trump referred to January 6 as “a day of love”] “Oh, I know that look. That’s the look your dad gives you when you’ve obviously been lying to him. ‘No dad, actually they switched all the grades around so now F is the highest. Anyway, before you go out to the garage, I don’t know where the car is.'”
desi lydic
[On Trump defending his racist slurs against Haitian immigrants with the claim, “All I do is report”] “All he does is report rumors he sees online. It reminds me of Walter Cronkite’s famous sign-off. [Dubbed clip of the legendary CBS newsman] ‘And that’s the Facebook post I saw on my aunt’s coworker’s news feed.'”
stephen colbert
“January 6 was ‘a day of love.’ Sure we all remember January 6. That was the day countless rioters found their soulmates. Wait, I read that wrong—cellmates.”
desi lydic
[On Trump tellingly referring to the January 6 rioters as “we,” and claiming “the others had guns”] “You mean the police. Yes, the police your animals attacked had guns.”
jimmy kimmel
[On the row of skeptical women listening to Trump’s ludicrously contradictory nonsense, “Nothing done wrong. And action was taken, strong action. Ashli Babbitt was killed, nobody was killed…”] “I can’t believe I had to watch Univision to feel like I had representation on TV.”
desi lydic
“Oh my God, it was like whole row of Melanias looking at him.”
jimmy kimmel
[On Trump being unable to say three nice things about Kamala Harris in response to a questioner, only managing, “She seems to have a nice way about her”] “You know he was this close to saying she has a nice rack.”
jimmy kimmel
Maybe This Is Why He Wants to Eliminate FEMA?
“And then we have the storming of the Daniels,” Jimmy Kimmel segued after his take on Trump Univision debacle. Yes, Donald Trump has been linked to yet another scandal involving Stormy Daniels, the adult film star he cheated on his third wife with while Melania Trump was recovering from the birth of their child.
After being convicted of 34 felonies surrounding his hush-money/election interference scheme to pay Daniels not to tell anyone about his adultery during the 2016 campaign, Trump’s lawyers, as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported, approached Daniels over this past summer with yet another payoff plot to keep her from reopening that squirmy can of undersized worms. Now putting in writing the exact same criminal plot your client got 34 felony beefs for (Trump’s out on bail, as a reminder) might seem unfathomably stupid…
Anyway, maybe they, like the makers of the deeply dopey 1999 thriller Double Jeopardy, just didn’t understand how double jeopardy works?
“Which to me is a lot of money to pay a person you didn’t have sex with to not tell anyone you had sex with them. She already told us he’s bad in bed and hung like a baby mushroom, I don’t know what more she could have to reveal.”
jimmy kimmel
[On the Trump camp’s non-denial that “foreign actors” with a grudge hacked the documents Maddow uncovered about the scheme] “Hmm, I wonder if there are any foreigners who are still upset with Donald Trump over the Stormy Daniels thing? [Shows photo of a scowling Melania Trump] Oh yes, right, there is that one.”
jimmy kimmel
From Stormy to Scammy
Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t done with his favorite least-favorite viewer, though. Digging into the newest(?) Trump scandal, Kimmel related the sketchy details of Trump’s various fundraising “contests,” in which people are promised everything from luxury trips to Trump’s gaudy golf club to one-on-one sit-down to talk policy with the guy who rants about Democrats wanting to ban windows. (For a sizable donation, naturally.)
Thing is, there’s little proof anybody actually wins anything. Well, except for one guy with the too-perfect-to-be true name of William McGuffin, who apparently sat with Trump at one of those car racing events Trump so enjoys.
[On the flood of Trump contest emails] “I actually got one myself last week. It said, ‘Friend, you’re invited to Mar-a-Lago.’ Which for me feels like a trap.”
jimmy kimmel
“Some of these clubs claim that members get the opportunity to give Trump advice in person, which is obviously not hap—would you take advice from a person you juts scammed out of their vacation money?”
jimmy kimmel
[On one contest’s alluring promise of a London meeting with Don Jr.] “That’s right, travel 5,000 miles to share a teabag with a douchebag.”
jimmy kimmel
“From 40 contests, the only winners the campaign confirmed was a man named William McGuffin and his son who got to meet Trump at a Formula One race. That was it. And the only reason they got that is that Trump probably thought they were bringing him a McMuffin and misunderstood.”
jimmy kimmel
Potpourri
“We’re now 18 days away from the election, and 95 days from our next insurrection.”
jimmy kimmel
“For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, the race is very close. The pollsters are calling it a toss-up, as in, ‘I’m about to toss up my lunch from this election already.'”
jimmy kimmel
[On Trump agreeing with a fawning podcaster that he has “a fertile mind”] “It’s very fertile, it’s literally full of fertilizer.”
jimmy kimmel
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