Late-night hosts tore into Donald Trump’s extremely long State of the Union address and a bombshell new report on redactions from the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Seth Meyers
Donald Trump arrived to his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening with low expectations and even lower goodwill, with his approval rating hovering somewhere around a dismal 36%. “So the polling was bad before the speech and bad after the speech,” Seth Meyers reported on Wednesday evening, “and on top of that it was long and boring,” clocking in at a record one hour and 47 minutes.
Or, if you’re Republican, it was “the best State of the Union speech that I’ve seen”, to quote the House speaker, Mike Johnson. Ted Cruz went one step further, calling it “majestic”. And according to one Fox News commentator: “Any historian who’s writing about this presidency has to watch this speech tonight and read it carefully.”
“Historians have to read it carefully? Trump didn’t read it carefully!” the Late Night responded before footage of Trump stumbling over nonsensical sentences.
“And yet despite the fact that it strained everyone’s attention spans, Trump expected everyone to leap to their feet and applaud for him, including the Democrats, and his feelings were very hurt when they didn’t,” he continued. When Democrats refused to applaud, Trump lashed out – “These people are crazy,” he said menacingly.
“Trump is so desperate for a win, he tried to co-opt the US men’s hockey team’s Olympic gold medal like he had something to do with it,” Meyers added before a clip of Trump bragging: “Our country is winning again, and in fact we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it.”
“Hey man, you’re not winning,” Meyers corrected. “They’re winning. You didn’t win jack shit.
“Trump used his speech the way he uses all of his speeches: as a vehicle to attack anyone who doesn’t bend the knee,” he concluded. “And since that’s a majority of the country, his poll numbers are terrible.”
Stephen Colbert
“We’re still all recovering from the president’s bramble ramble brain jamble,” said Stephen Colbert on Wednesday’s Late Show. “But the reviews are in, and they are bad.” The New York Times called it a “tedious, tiresome performance”, while the Atlantic declared that “the State of the Union revealed a sad reality”.
Colbert, for what it’s worth, found the speech “boring and disturbing”, both for what was said and for what was not.
“One thing Trump did not mention in his two-hour, hockey-humping, immigrant grumbling jambaroo was anything about the Epstein files,” Colbert noted. “Now, it is well known that big, incriminating stuff has been redacted from what Pam Bondi released,” including 50 pages of material related to Trump. “And it’s totally on-brand for the DoJ – this DoJ especially – to be protecting Trump. It’s the least surprising headline since ‘Youngest child becomes theater major’.”
“Now, we don’t know exactly what’s in there or if it’s true, and whatever it is, Trump denies any wrongdoing,” he continued. “But it is weird that these files specifically are missing, because the law prohibits redacting on the basis of embarrassment or reputational harm.” And according to the New York Times, the missing files include FBI memos summarizing interviews conducted by the bureau with a woman who alleged in 2019 that she had been sexually assaulted by Trump and Epstein when she was 13 to 15 years old.
“Holy unholy. This would be the worst scandal in presidential history,” Colbert marveled. “That the files are missing should be the biggest story in the world, but we’re all so exhausted and worn down by this turd of a time that when a bombshell like this comes along, we go, ‘Oh, that’s terrible … I wonder if that baby monkey made friends yet.’”
Jimmy Kimmel
In Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel continued to trace the fallout from Trump’s State of the Union address. “Basically Trump’s message to America, if you didn’t see it last night, was if you’re struggling financially or trying to support your family by putting food on the table, if you’re having a hard time, you’re wrong. You’re actually very rich, and let’s stop talking about it.
“Four days after the supreme court torched his tariffs – the centerpiece of his cockamamie foreign policy – he said we are winning so much, we don’t know what to do with it,” he added. “This is what happens to old people who only watch Fox News: they become confused about reality.
“The fact that he’s 79 years old and spoke uninterrupted for almost two hours – it’s the only proof I’ll ever need that he wears a diaper,” he quipped. “He’s definitely wearing a diaper. He might be wearing two diapers.”
Later in his monologue, Kimmel also touched on the bombshell New York Times story on redactions from the Epstein files including FBI interviews with a woman who alleged that Trump and Epstein sexually assaulted her when she was a young teenager.
Robert Garcia, a House Democrat on the oversight committee, confirmed in a statement that the justice department “appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes”.
“Hey Pam Bondi, cancel your blowout! We’ve got heinous crimes to investigate here,” Kimmel said with disgust. “Why are they being allowed to hide this stuff? You’re supposed to release the files! What a bunch of hypocrites. If these interviews were on Hunter Biden’s laptop, we’d know every word of them.”
The Daily Show
And on The Daily Show, Desi Lydic examined the gory rhetoric of Trump’s speech, in which he bragged about the US military shooting targets in the head and streaking halls with blood. “Look, there’s nothing wrong with honoring Americans who have been through tragedies, but we used to have American presidents who could do that without sounding like a six-year-old dismembering his GI Joes,” she said.
But the speech “wasn’t just two hours of Donald Trump traumatizing America”, she added. “One reason that the speech went so long is because Republicans kept interrupting for applause breaks, which Trump would just bask in, rotating back and forth like he was stuck on oscillating-fan mode.
“But the Democrats stayed seated almost the entire night, and you could tell it started to get under Trump’s skin.”
Faced with a disapproving audience, Trump lashed out. “How do you not stand?” he shouted. “You should be ashamed of yourselves!”
“Mr President, I will have you know that the Democrats are not standing because they are outraged by your tyranny and lawless behavior … and also they’re asleep right now,” Lydic joked before clips of Democratic lawmakers who apparently dozed off during the speech.
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