Late-night hosts took aim at JD Vance over his unusual birthday demand and Donald Trump over his disastrous tariffs.
Stephen Colbert
On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert called it “a significant day for our economy” with Trump’s controversial tariffs finally kicking in. He said it’s a day to “set your clocks back to more expensive” with import taxes now the highest they’ve been since the Great Depression.
Colbert said it’s “never a great sign to be compared to the worst thing ever”.
Tariffs on certain countries are lower if negotiations have been successful or “if the president’s mad at you they can be much higher”.
This week saw Apple announce $100bn worth of additional investment in the US, but there is a smaller pool of American workers with the skills necessary to make an iPhone. “I believe America’s children can do anything!” Colbert joked.
The company’s CEO, Tim Cook, was filmed this week in the Oval Office giving Trump a gift which was partly made of 24-carat gold. Colbert called it “lavish corporate bottom-smooching”.
In the same press opportunity, Trump again slammed Colbert for having “no talent” but did concede that he has better ratings than Kimmel or Fallon, whom he said also had no talent. “We’re all equally untalented,” Colbert said, before adding: “Thank you for watching, sir.”
Colbert said that while we are “plunging headfirst into techno-feudalism”, the Secret Service is busy raising the water level of an Ohio river for Vance’s family boat trip to celebrate his birthday. He called it an “insane spoiled baby emperor move”.
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers said that Trump “clearly has no interest in doing the job of president” and doesn’t “know or care what his own administration is doing on a daily basis”.
He is too busy renovating the White House with plans revealed this week for a new $200m ballroom decked out in gold. Trump has said it’s important as there hasn’t been a president like him who has been good at ballrooms before.
Meyers commented that it’s “never been a problem that our presidents weren’t good at ballrooms”.
To show how little Trump knows about the day-to-day, he played a clip just after the US illegally bombed Iran in which he was told by a reporter that the intelligence community said it had no evidence that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon, which the president called false.
This week when he was asked about Robert F Kennedy Jr’s decision to cancel $500m in contracts for vaccine development, he also appeared confused. “For a guy who watches cable news all day, you sure seem caught off-guard by the news,” Meyers said.
There are also plans to put a nuclear reactor on the moon, a decision bragged about on Fox News with claims that “Trump doesn’t play by the rules”. Meyers admitted that this is true as at Nasa, rule No 1 is “don’t blow up the moon”.
Ignoring the inflation that’s ballooning thanks in part to Trump’s tariffs, the administration is instead having to deal with the fallout of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump “flew into a rage again” after being asked about it this week.
It’s still proving to be “explosive for Trump and his Maga base” and so this week a dinner was planned on Epstein strategy involving high-ranking loyalists. Nothing like a “secretive cabal” of powerful people to settle the conspiracy theorists, Meyers noted.
It was reportedly planned by Vance, whom Trump threw under the bus when he was asked about it this week. “No matter how much you try to appease Trump or suck up to him, he’s eventually going to betray you,” he said.
