Late-night hosts dig into Donald Trump’s attempts to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein files scandal plaguing his administration.
Stephen Colbert
“It’s a great day to be me, because I am not Donald Trump,” said Stephen Colbert on Tuesday’s Late Show. “That guy has got a lot of problems. First of all, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal just won’t ‘kill itself.’ And we might have a hint why Trump hasn’t been that eager to release those files.”
According to Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois, a thousand FBI agents were put on 24-hour shifts in March to review approximately 100,000 records related to Epstein and flag any mentions of Trump. “That is a suspiciously Herculean effort,” said Colbert. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t hide who Dumpty humped with his friend.”
Now even Maga is demanding answers – 11 congressional Republicans have said they will join Democrats to vote to release the Epstein files, making a majority in Congress. In response, speaker Mike Johnson shut down the House until September to block the vote. “It’s a common parliamentary maneuver known as [unintelligible screeching],” Colbert joked with his fingers in his ears.
“You cannot blame Trump and his allies for being scared here,” he continued, “because the more we know about Trump’s relationship to Epstein, the more we wish we didn’t.”
According to court records, Trump flew on Epstein’s plane at least seven times. “That doesn’t mean he did anything illegal, but it’s not a great look when you fly on the pedophile’s plane enough times to earn diamond pervert status,” Colbert quipped.
The furor is digging up other moments from Trump’s “creepy past”, such as a clip from the Howard Stern show in 2006 where he said he “had no age limit” for sex with women.
The Stern clip “is just a small taste of his long public history of pervitude, and it all makes it hard to accept Donald Trump’s Epstein denials”, said Colbert. “I mean, it would be easier to accept Sir Mix-a-Lot releasing ‘I Never Visited Big Butt Island.’”
“Of course, whenever Trump is backed into a corner, he needs to change the subject and throw red meat to the carnivorous base,” he continued. “And their favorite cut is filet of Obama.”
Asked about the Epstein scandal in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump rambled about “irrefutable truth that Obama was ‘sedacious’”.
“Wow, it takes extraordinary confidence to call a former president ‘sedacious,’” said Colbert, “because that is not a word”.
The Daily Show
“Trump has been doing everything that he can to keep those files under wraps,” said new Daily Show guest host Josh Johnson on Tuesday. “He’s even got his friends in Congress trying to help,” as speaker Mike Johnson (no relation) shut down the House until September to avoid a vote on releasing the Epstein files. “Do you understand that they cleared Congress out for the summer like they found a dookie in the pool,” Johnson joked.
“Trying to shut down the release of the files only makes them more interesting,” he continued. “So for the last week, Trump has been throwing every distraction he can at us.” Johnson went through each distraction one by one, starting with blaming Barack Obama with, as Trump put it, “irrefutable proof that Obama was sedacious”.
“Sedacious? It sounds like he’s mispronouncing a new black friend’s name,” Johnson joked. “The problem with this distraction is that it’s so old, Jeffrey Epstein wouldn’t date it. Trump has been going after Obama for decades – he’s going to need something else.”
Such as a health diagnosis of “chronic venous insufficiency”, which the White House offered after photos showed Trump with swollen ankles. “I cannot stress how big of a deal this is, because they never admit that Trump has anything but impeccable health,” said Johnson. “Usually, they bring out a doctor to be like, ‘Donald Trump has big muscles and a girthy ass dick. Medically speaking, he makes Hercules look like a pig with cancer.’”
“His doctors once said that his blood pressure was ‘astonishingly excellent.’ That’s not even how blood pressure works!” he added. “But I get why this put this out. One, it’s a good distraction. And two, people have been starting to notice that Trump looks, medically speaking, like shit.”
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers mocked one of Trump’s Truth Social posts from the weekend, in which he celebrated six months of his second term and said “wow, time flies.”
“Does it, though?” Meyers responded. “It’s been six months of this term, but we already did four years of you, and even when [Joe Biden] was president, you were still the president of every news cycle. It feels like you’ve been president forever. I think it goes Washington, Jefferson, Adams and then you.”
In other news, King Charles named his wife, Queen Camilla, the vice admiral of the United Kingdom last week in honor of her 78th birthday. “And not to be outdone, President Trump has finally named First Lady Melania as his emergency contact,” Meyers quipped.
And the White House released a memo outlining the president’s health issues, saying that the bruising seen on the back of his hand in several photographs was “consistent with minor soft tissue irritation from frequent hand-shaking”.
“I just love that his followers have to somehow reconcile this idea that he’s this powerful strongman but also he gets bruises if you touch him,” Meyers laughed. “He’s the indestructible savior of America, but also he’s basically a plum.”
