Seth Meyers spoke about rising tensions within the Republican party with Donald Trump losing support from his base over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
The Late Night host spoke about yesterday’s dramatic meeting in the situation room to discuss Epstein, an ongoing crisis that has seen the president becoming “wildly unpopular”.
Meyers said that Trump is “by all the accounts the most unpopular president of all time” and up until this point has only been “able to hang on to power because he has a tight grip on the Republican party no matter what he did or how bad things got”.
But a new poll shows that only 33% of American adults approve of how the president is managing the government, a figure that’s down from March with the fall driven by Republicans or independents.
Meyers called this “a meaningful and real development” and “it’s not coming out of thin air” with Trump “pissing off Maga” in multiple ways.
In a recent interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, the president defended the importance of H-1B visas, saying that workers need to come from outside the US as there’s not enough people with “certain talents”.
Meyers joked that Trump is now saying “you can’t expect me to make America again with only Americans”.
His comments were criticised as being overly negative about US workers. “You’re the president – you’re supposed to talk us up,” Meyers said. “You’re the mascot for America.”
Trump took aim at people queueing for unemployment, which led Meyers to joke: “Why are you shitting on people in the unemployment line? If you didn’t have a rich dad, that’s where you would be.”
Meyers said that Trump “should be a cheerleader for America” before playing a montage of him saying that’s exactly what he is in the past.
His base is also annoyed with the Epstein scandal, a “far-reaching conspiracy that Maga spent years obsessing over” and one that has “caused a panic in Trump world”.
Yesterday saw the president “flustered” in front of press with him refusing to take questions from reporters while claiming that the country was doing well and that it was a great day.
Meyers said he has “never seen anyone so sad while saying the words ‘it’s a great day’”.
He said Trump “looks like a kid that asked for an Xbox for Christmas but got a jigsaw puzzle instead”.
He spoke about the “emergency meetings over this Epstein bombshell” that involved a string of high-ranking names as well as the controversial Colorado representative Lauren Boebert, who was one of the few Republicans to vote for the release of the Epstein files.
“You know you’re in the shit when you’ve got to count on Lauren Boebert to bail you out,” he joked, referring to her as a “crazy” person.
He added: “It’s taken 10 years but we’re finally seeing a sizable portion of the Maga base grow frustrated with Trump both on policy and on the Epstein scandal. It’s still not a majority, but a growing number of Republicans are losing patience with Trump.”
