The continued fallout from the revelation that a confused reporter was unwittingly made privy to top secret information as it was being discussed by top officials in the Trump Adminstration had late-night hosts practically giddy with schadenfreude (and not a little rage) Tuesday. Here’s our rundown.
Ronny Chieng
Tagging in for the rest of the Daily Show‘s week after Monday host Jon Stewart, Ronny Chieng came out swinging Tuesday, scolding his already tittering audience, noting, “I know you godd*mn hippies like to blame Donald Trump for f*cking everything up in the country. But, hey, not everything that happens is his fault—he has a whole administration that can f*ck up for him.”
Cue the W.G. Snuffy Walden fanfare for Chieng’s new Daily Show segment,” The Worst Wing.
“Oh, ha ha ha ha ha. You think that’s funny, don’t you? That the stupid Secretary of Defense is so stupid and/or drunk that he texted ‘we’re clean on OPSEC’ when there’s a reporter right in the group chat? Well laugh it up, people. Because unlike you, I have human empathy for these people who are just trying their best to kill other humans.”
“By the way, it wasn’t even Pete Hegseth who added him. It was some other incompetent guy at the highest levels of government, okay? [It was National Security Adviser Mike Waltz.] You think Hegseth has the editor of The Atlantic magazine saved in his phone? No way, okay. If Hegseth auto-filled a contact into a group chat, it would be like ‘Tampa Bay Blonde with Bugs Bunny Tattoo.'”
“You have to ask, how did this happen? Don’t you guys have tech support in the government? [Photo of Elon Musk wearing his ‘tech support’ t-shirt at a cabinet meeting] Oh…”
“Is anyone else kind of upset that we’re conducting war by emoji now? I mean, what does this even mean, ‘I’m gonna fist the flag and then set it on fire?‘”
Chieng was equally unsparing going after Republicans who immediately snapped into full-on damage control mode, clearly demonstrating that fury about unsecured communications is purely a one-party issue in their minds.
“‘Boris, I gave you the sound bite—stop asking followup questions. If I wanted to talk to a journalist, I would be on a private group chat with Pete Hegseth.'”
on rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) mocking a reporter for asking about the double standard
“They weren’t even supposed to be talking about this stuff on Signal in the first place, okay? Signal might be a good app for you and me and our local drug dealer, but it’s not for the Pentagon to plan wars on.”
“That’s right, foreign adversaries could be watching whatever Pete Hegseth types into his phone. Like ‘bar near me,’ or ‘how to fool breathalyzer,’ or ‘how to uncrash car.'”
on the signal app’S security vulnerabilities
“‘Precision?’ Even your their texts weren’t hitting their intended targets.”
on house speaker Mike johnson (R-LA) praising the texters’ planning
“This is like when your sex tape leaks and you’re like, ‘Hey, I’m glad you saw all of it. This proves my dick works.'”
“By the way, the Trump Administration admitted that this thing happened, but it was a small mistake, and it was a good thing that it happened, but also what if the reporter made the whole thing up?”
“So this reporter who is dishonest and sucks is also correct. And we added him to our group chat because he’s a fun hang? You can’t use, ‘it was a mistake’ and ‘it was fake news.’ You gotta pick one, okay? You gotta get together and figure it out—but not in a group chat! No more group chats.”
Stephen Colbert
Not to be outdone, Stephen Colbert scolded his own audience by noting, “For the last two months, all you worry warts out there have been running around going, ‘Oh, the Trump administration’s evil!’ I don’t think that’s fair. They’re also dumb.”
“That must have been really weird for Jeffrey. ‘Well, looks like the group chat’s blowing up—Yemen?!'”
on journalist goldberg initially thinking his inclusion was a hoax
“Turns out it was real and ‘Houthis’ refers to ‘Houthis idiots running our government?'”
“According to Goldberg, the texts sounded as if they were written by the people who purportedly sent them. Yeah, only the real Pete Hegseth would text, ‘u guys wamna get th pattry spartted? it’s five o’clork sometimes!'”
“This is a gargantuanly stupid screw-up. We have officially entered the Amelia Bedelia stage of government.”
“The J.D. Vance account texted ‘I think we are making a mistake.’ Coincidentally, also the original name of the group chat.”
“So to recap: the Secretary of Defense posted, on a publicly available app, specific war plans which were then seen by a reporter who was accidentally on the thread. It’s a phenomenon previously known as ‘brother of the bride on the bachelor party text chain.'”
“What else are these ‘merit-based hires‘ posting? For all we know, for just $4.99 a month you might see the launch codes on OnlyFans.”
“Trump might plead ignorance—and that’s believable.”
Jimmy Kimmel
Echoing Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel could only assess the current state of the Trump Aministration’s “confederacy of dunces” by noting, “This week, in the race between dumb and evil, dumb is in the lead.”
“They are also not supposed to have conversations like this on Signal because it can be hacked. And just to add another also to the mix, one of the people on the chain was in Russia at the time of the texts—not that they would ever try to look at those.”
“This is like—and I know Pete can relate to this—this is like getting drunk and driving your car into a lamppost, and blaming the lamppost.”
on Hegseth attacking the reporter for being included in the chat
Kimmel also piled on with some ready clips of the exact same people on the chat like Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and Mike Waltz excoriating Hillary Clinton for supposedly exposing sensitive information in the past.
“I bet Hillary is walking around the woods laughing her ass off today.”
“What happened to this guy? He used to fire people on a daily basis—he fired Meat Loaf for less than this.”
on trump sayng he’s not planning to fire anybody
Jimmy Fallon
Leaping into the Trump administration data breach, Fallon faked getting a phone notification at the start of his Tonight Show monologue, returning to sheepishly explain, “Sorry, just got a text. Apparently we’re invading Greenland.”
“Today Trump said it will never happen again. From now on they will only chat about war plans over SnapChat.”
“Trump called the massive leak of classified information ‘a glitch.’ Which feels sort of like Boeing referring to a door flying off as ‘a little oopsie.'”
“Democrats were like, ‘Glitch, please.'”
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth denied responsibility for the security failure and insists that “nobody was texting war plans,’ even though the White House confirmed the breach. Yeah, pretty epic blunder. Today Trump gave it four out for five Giulianis.”
Fallon also noted the Trump administration’s cozy relationship with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, casting a suspicious glance at the portrait of Trump gifted by Putin this week.
“Vladimir Putin had a portrait of Trump made and gave it to him as a gift. Although it’s concerning–when Trump hung it up his eyes started shifting.”
“After receiving the portrait, Trump told Putin, ‘How did you know I would want that?’ Putin was like, ‘I also was on group chat.'”
And speaking of looming national catastrophes…
“Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that she’s going to eliminate FEMA. She was like, ‘FEMA is so bad. Literally everywhere they go, there’s a huge disaster.'”
“Their job is to figure out which cars were vandalized and which cars just exploded themselves.”
on the fbi planning to investigate anti-tesla vandalism
Taylor Tomlinson
Over on After Midnight, Taylor Tomlinson was mostly concerned with news that DNA testing company 23andMe is planning to sell off its customers’ most intimate information after going bankrupt this week.
“Who would have thought that a company that asks you to spit into an envelope and send it to them doesn’t have a good business plan?”
“I’m just saying, all the other spit-based companies are doing well. PornHub—that’s the only one, but it’s doing great.”
“It’s crazy that a company can go bankrupt and sell your genetic data. Like, ‘You thought you were 20 percent Scottish? Well now you’re 100 percent Spirit Halloween.”
Tomlinson then moved on with the segue, “Speaking of gross—Florida!” To be fair, she was talking about that GOP-run state planning to allow children as young as 14 to work overnight, at least partly to make up the workforce lost to Trump’s anti-immigrant sweeps.
“It sounds bad, but this is the only way to get government-sponsored child care in red states.”
“Honestly, I didn’t even know there were children in Florida. I thought Floridians were just moving there for retirement or they just emerged from a toxic swamp, 46 years old with two DUIs.”
Tomlinson then moved overseas, where American tourists are said to be concerned that Trump administration policies will sour other countries’ reactions to them.
“Remember the good old days when people in France would be rude to Americans just for fun? Who knew we would long for the days when the worst thing people would say about us was that we were tacky and loud? Now if I go to Paris and somebody insults my outfit, I’m gonna be like, ‘Oh my God, thank you so much for not calling me a fascist.'”
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