After six long months of taping his show from his attic and then his in-laws’ house, Seth Meyers finally returned to his 30 Rock studio Tuesday night to take “A Closer Look” at the damning report about President Donald Trump and the U.S. military.
The Late Night host caught up on everything he missed during a two-week hiatus at the end of the summer before arriving at Trump’s “most brazen and infuriating act of reality distortion” this week when he “tried to con people into thinking he’s an anti-war president.”
Meyers argued the Atlantic report that Trump called American soldiers “losers” and “suckers” was not only confirmed by multiple news outlets but also by “common sense.” He added, “I mean, it sounds exactly like something Trump would say. He probably thinks anyone who dies is a sucker.”
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Nor did the host buy Trump’s attempt to rebrand himself as an “anti-war activist,” calling it an “especially infuriating lie coming from a guy who has repeatedly touted billions in arms sales to a brutal regime in Saudi Arabia, vetoed a bill to end U.S. involvement in the horrific war in Yemen, massively expanded bombing campaigns across the world—including a record number in Afghanistan, increased the Pentagon’s budget for the fifth consecutive year to the point where it’s now near Iraq War levels, added billions to a Pentagon slush fund specifically for war fighting, and has bragged about sending U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia would pay for it.”
“But the story about denigrating Americans who died or were wounded in war is such a perfect window into the reality-distortion machine on the right,” Meyers said, explaining that even after Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin confirmed the story, her colleagues “sought to undercut it.”
He highlighted Fox’s Greg Gutfeld, Mollie Hemingway and Jon Scott who all characterized the story as a “hoax” despite their network’s own reporting to the contrary.
“Your own network confirmed it!” Meyers said in response. “Do you guys watch your own channel or do you just take naps until Trump tweets something?”
“And there’s no better indication that Fox is a propaganda machine and not a real news organization than the fact that they’re willing to undercut their own reporting to serve the president’s agenda,” he added. “No legitimate news organization would do that. When The New York Times reports something negative about Joe Biden they don’t use the headline, ‘Failing New York Times Spreads Fake News—Sad!’”
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