With several late-night hosts on holiday, Seth Meyers took a closer look at the Trump administration’s deployment of the national guard in Washington DC as a playbook for other cities.
Seth Meyers
“Donald Trump is always laser-focused on the important stuff – no, not inflation, not healthcare, not jobs,” said Seth Meyers on Wednesday evening. “He’s focused on giving himself an award.”
On Wednesday, Trump gave a typically rambling speech at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the formerly prestigious performance hall that he took over early in his term, purging the board and replacing it with loyalists. Presenting the center’s annual honorees, the president said: “I always wanted one, I was never able to get one … I would’ve taken it, if they would’ve called me. I waited, and waited, and waited, and then said, ‘To hell with it, I’ll become chairman and I’ll give myself an honor.’ Next year we’ll honor Trump, OK?”
“I like how everyone laughs at him, and then he says, ‘No, it’s true, actually,’” the Late Night host responded. “Second, he’s definitely not joking about giving himself an award. This is the guy who made a fake Time magazine cover for himself to hang on his wall.
“I have no trouble believing that he’d give himself a made-up award called the ‘Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Nobel Prize EGOT Award for Most Everything’,” Meyers added.
Trump also announced that he would host the annual Kennedy Center Honors, and claimed he had to be talked into it by his team because he has better things to do as president. “Well, I think you deserve the award for best original screenplay, because that’s definitely a fake conversation that did not happen,” Meyers laughed.
Meyers then turned to the other major political story this week: Trump taking over the Washington DC Metropolitan police and deploying the national guard to combat a made-up crime wave in the city. Meyers noted that Republicans see this action as a playbook for other cities, despite the fact that, in truth, violent crime rates are down in most major cities. The states with the highest crime rates, such as Louisiana and Mississippi, are largely controlled by Republicans.
“The right has created this myth about crime in big cities that isn’t true,” Meyers said. “It’s a playbook that Republicans have used for decades, and Trump repeated it in 2024.
“In a clear sign that this is all just theater, Trump is threatening to only send the national guard to cities controlled by Democrats,” calling the DC action a “beacon for New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other places all over the country”.
“The myth of urban crime is central to the right’s worldview,” Meyers noted. “For years, they basically made it their whole thing to be afraid of cities.” He pointed to the example of the US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, on Fox News, complaining about crime rates on the New York City subway and also taking a shot at its cleanliness.
Meyers got defensive. “Only New Yorkers are allowed to shit on the New York City subway. I mean that figuratively and sadly sometimes literally,” he said.
“Trump doesn’t want to fix problems in big cities, because he loves problems in big cities,” he concluded. “He loves problems anywhere that can distract from his problems. And he definitely has problems – his polling numbers are not great, his Maga base is questioning his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and voters are starting to suspect that the Trump administration might be,” to quote Trump himself, “a crime pot.”
