“The U.S. coronavirus outbreak hit a grim new milestone yesterday with over 3,000 deaths in one day, a global record,” Seth Meyers said at the top of his “A Closer Look” segment Thursday night, “but the president was too busy live-tweeting Fox News and trying get the results of an election he lost overturned.”
With that one sentence, the Late Night host summed up perhaps the most shameful week of Donald Trump’s “sick, depraved and sadistic” presidency. “We’re in the midst of a national calamity unlike anything most of us have seen in our lifetimes,” the host said. “It’s an ongoing emergency with over 200,000 new cases every day and 100,000 Americans in the hospital as we speak.”
“Republicans spent over $7 million in two and half years investigating four American deaths in Benghazi in order to, by their own admission, drag down Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers,” he continued. “But when you bring up COVID, they act like it’s a new TikTok trend they’ve never heard of before.”
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And “as grotesque and sociopathic as the indifference and incompetence from Trump and the Republican Party have been,” Meyers said, “there’s plenty of blame to go around”—including for Democrats like the mayor of Austin, Texas, who told residents to “stay home” while vacationing in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
But for Meyers, it all comes back to the lack of leadership from Trump himself. “The richest country on earth should have a political system that sees the dire situation we’re in—3,000 dead in a day, 100,000 hospitalized, millions facing eviction, unemployment and hunger—and rushes to do something about it.”
Instead, Vice President (and coronavirus task force head) Mike Pence is speechifying about protecting American ‘freedom in space’ and President Trump is tweeting Tucker Carlson quotes and false statements claiming that no candidate has ever won Ohio and Florida and lost the presidency.
As Meyers pointed out, that last fact is “true, if you just start counting after 1960” when Richard Nixon did exactly that. “Do these guys do, like, any research before they write this stuff?” he asked. “Can you not afford a Siri or a Clippy? Just swallow your pride and Ask Jeeves for god’s sake.”
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