Late-night hosts continued to track the fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that Donald Trump just won’t let go and the Environmental Protection Agency giving up on the environment.
Seth Meyers
Seth Meyers continued to relish Donald Trump’s Jeffrey Epstein scandal that just won’t go away, as the president was hounded by questions about his friendship with the convicted sex offender while in Scotland. “They did this to themselves,” the Late Night host said of Maga’s Epstein quagmire. “This is like if after Trump screamed they’re eating the dogs in a debate, Donald Trump started eating the dog.”
Despite Trump’s evident frustration with the topic, “people haven’t moved on, because Trump and his Maga mates spent years cynically hyping up the Epstein conspiracy,” Meyers explained on Wednesday evening. “They thought only their political enemies would be harmed. But they either forgot or completely ignored the fact that Trump was Epstein’s best friend. It’s like basing an entire political movement around your opposition to Bert, and then voting for Ernie for president.”
Meyers then poked fun at Trump’s many defenses against the Epstein scandal, starting with his claim that he didn’t send a lewd birthday greeting to Epstein featuring a nude drawing of a woman, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. As Trump said: “I don’t do drawings of women.”
“The way you keep saying ‘I don’t do drawings of women,’ instead of just saying ‘I don’t do drawings of people’ makes it sound like you do a ton of drawings of dudes,” Meyers laughed.
Trump then “dug the hole deeper” by saying that his friendship with Epstein ended only because Epstein hired employees out from under him.
“That’s not helping you, dude! Going out of your way to explain that you cut ties with a monster not because he was a monster, but because he hired people away from you makes you sound even worse,” said Meyers. “That’s like saying you stopped inviting Charles Manson to parties because he wouldn’t use a coaster.”
Asked on the flight back from Scotland if the workers Epstein hired away from Trump were young women, the president responded: “Well, I don’t want to say, but everyone knows the people who were taken. And the concept of taking people who work for me is bad.” He then confirmed that they were indeed young women who worked at the spa – “a great spa, one of the best spas in the world”.
Meyers just laughed – “If this were a Law & Order episode, right about here is where Trump’s attorney would turn to Jack McCoy and say, ‘He doesn’t say any more until we have a deal.’”
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert reacted to news that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is seeking to throw out the “endangerment finding” from 2009 that found that greenhouse gases endanger health and public welfare. Eliminating the rule will allow the Trump administration to scrap rules to reduce climate pollution from cars and trucks.
“OK, but you’re the Environmental Protection Agency. You’re supposed to protect the environment!” Colbert fumed. “You’re just giving up? This explains why Woodsy Owl has updated his catchphrase to: ‘Why give a hoot? I’m just filling my pockets with rocks and walking into the river like Virginia Woolf.’”
Trump’s EPA head, Lee Zeldin, appeared on Fox News with the energy secretary, Chris Wright, to push back on what they see as a “climate change hoax”. “The goal is to restore confidence in science and data and rationalism,” Wright said. “That is what enabled the creation of modern science, then we slid back into this kind of cancel culture, Orwellian squelching of science.”
“Nice try, fellas, but it makes it hard to dismiss global warming when you’re sharing the screen with a heat index of 126 degrees in Missouri,” Colbert responded.
In “more proof” that “the Earth is mad at us,” there was also a powerful 8.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Russia’s eastern Kamchatka peninsula. There were only a few injuries, despite the fact that the quake occurred along Russia’s so-called “megathrust” fault line. “Yes, the Megathrust Fault, which is right next to Humpmaster Canyon and the Cape of I Had a Big Dinner, Can We Just Watch Gilded Age?” Colbert joked.
