While ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel from the air “indefinitely” over comments on Charlie Kirk, the other late-night hosts talked Robert F Kennedy’s vaccine chaos and Kash Patel’s disastrous hearing on Capitol Hill.
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert opened Wednesday’s monologue with an announcement from Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, that in the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing, the justice department would target hate speech. “And conservatives were not thrilled by this news,” said Colbert. The conservative commentator Brit Hume posted on X: “Someone needs to explain to Ms Bondi that so-called ‘hate speech,’ repulsive though it may be, is protected by the First Amendment. She should know this.”
“Yes, the founders wanted even repulsive speech protected,” the Late Show host joked. “That’s why Ben Franklin wrote: ‘There is no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech. Hey, James Madison, the dog pound called, they caught your wife again. Boom! Ya just got Frankl’d.’”
Colbert then pivoted to falling childhood vaccination rates across the US. “We have successfully cured a myriad of childhood diseases and we’re just deciding not to use it any more,” he said. “What other scientific advances are people going to toss out next? ‘I’ve done my own research, thank you, and I am not comfortable letting my children use ‘the wheel’. Before they leave for school on an ox-drawn sledge, I always remind them: fire bad!’”
Colbert blamed, in part, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary, who has “thrown our public health agencies into complete chaos, forcing out career health experts”.
To wit, the Senate heard testimony from the recently fired head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Susan Monarez, who said that Kennedy called Trump every day to talk about changing the childhood vaccine schedule. “He called the president every day?” Colbert exclaimed, imagining such a phone call: “Bobby, why are you calling the president of the United States at 4 o’clock in the morning? I’m busy tweeting an AI video of me as a talking baby fighting a lion that’s on fire.”
The Daily Show
“President Trump still can’t shake the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, so this week Congress heard testimony from Kash Patel,” said Desi Lydic on the Daily Show. “And if I know anything about Kash Patel, it’s that he can smooth everything over.”
Lydic then cut to several clips of the embattled FBI director getting into shouting matches with several lawmakers on Capitol Hill over his refusal to release the Epstein files. One asked: “Why are you protecting pedophiles?” To which Patel replied: “That is maybe the most offensive thing you could say to me.”
“That is maybe the most offensive thing you could say to me?” Lydic laughed. “Patel is like, listen, there’s a lot you can say about me – like I’m the only person who looks dumber wearing glasses, or how I only got this job because Trump thought I was Dinesh D’Souza. But I almost felt bad for Patel. He had to convincingly pretend that his boss had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein, and he was not up for the task.”
For instance, Patel repeatedly said he did not know how many times Trump’s name appeared in the files, but also dismissed certain numbers out of hand. Asked if it was 1,000 or 500 times, Patel said: “I don’t know, but it’s not that.”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s not that,” Lydic joked, mimicking Patel. “Everyone just needs to calm down, OK? The president’s name appears in the pedophile sex crime report a normal number of times: somewhere between one and ‘hey, look over there!’”
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers noted that Trump thinks companies shouldn’t be forced to report earnings every quarter. “Or as NBC is hoping, ever?” he joked of his own network.
Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, announced that this was the safest summer on the New York City subways in at least 15 years, “because you can’t get mugged on a train that never shows up”, Meyers quipped.
According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, toxic fumes are leaking into airplanes and making passengers and crew sick, “though if you’re flying Spirit, they’re happy to crack a window”, Meyers joked.
In a recent post on Truth Social, Trump praised his son Eric for his new book, Under Siege: My Family’s Fight to Save Our Nation, which allegedly hit No 1 for memoirs on Amazon. “So congratulations to the book’s author,” Meyers said next to the logo for ChatGPT.
And the former MMA fighter Conor McGregor announced this week that he had withdrawn from the Irish presidential race after “careful reflection”. “Or as it’s known in Ireland: sobering up,” said Meyers.
