With most late-night hosts on holiday, Seth Meyers recaps Donald Trump’s rambling and factually inaccurate press conference about crime in Washington DC.
Seth Meyers
Donald Trump loves to make up numbers, from his false job statistics, to his arbitrary tariffs to his claim to lower prescription drug prices by an impossible “1500%”. “Trump has no shame, so he just keeps rolling with his made-up numbers,” said Seth Meyers on Monday’s Late Night, hours after Trump used bogus crime statistics as a justification for deploying the national guard in Washington DC.
The federal takeover of the capital’s police force was based on “numbers that once again make no sense”, said Meyers. “And you don’t have to take it from me. CNN factchecked him live as he was talking” with graphics confirming that violent crime is down 26% from the year prior, and 35% from the year before that. “We’ve had presidents who’ve lied before but we’ve never had a president who was this easy to factcheck,” said Meyers. “Who are you going to believe, the stats on the CNN or the guy who says he can lower drug prices by 1500%?”
Trump’s press conference announcing the takeover was “as with all things Trump, entirely for show”, Meyers continued. “And the way you know that is that the very first words he uttered were not about crime, but about his dream to build a new ballroom in the White House.”
After Trump’s diversion into his desire to build a giant gold ballroom in the White House, he showed some charts with “statistics” on local crime and just said: “OK?”
“Is this his new catchphrase now? He’s just going to hold up a chart and say ‘OK?’” Meyers laughed. “He’s like a lazy magician who doesn’t make you take a card, he just holds one up and acts like that’s what it was gonna be.’”
Trump talked about DC “like it was a dystopian hellhole out of a steampunk novel”. The city, he said, was “taken over by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people, caravans of mass youth rampage through city streets, they’re on ATV, motorbikes, they travel pretty well”.
“So clearly what happened is: he fell asleep watching Fox News, rolled over on the remote, accidentally changed the channel to HBO, woke up and saw Mad Max: Fury Road and thought it was still the news,” said Meyers.
Asked by a reporter how the crackdown on crime squared with his administration’s reported plan to reclassify marijuana, Trump answered: “We’re looking at it.” “Are you guys looking at it, or smoking it like five times a day?” Meyers wondered.
Marijuana use “might also explain why Trump doesn’t even seem to know where he is or where he’s going on a daily basis”, he added, as during the conference, Trump claimed to be going to Russia on Friday to meet with Vladimir Putin, when he’s actually meeting with the Russian president in Alaska. “Oh fuck, did you already give away Alaska?” Meyers joked. “I can’t wait to see the news report from that meeting. The US has struck an agreement with Russia in which Russia will give back the land it stole from Ukraine and the US in return will give Russia several states including Alaska, Rhode Island and New Jersey.”
“Ultimately, I think most of the Trump press conference could be summed up this way,” said Meyers, cutting to a clip of Trump saying “we’re formally declaring a public safety emergency … and it’s embarrassing for me to be up here.”
“Yes,” Meyers confirmed. “In a way, it’s embarrassing for all of us.”
