The night after Election Day, Seth Meyers went deep with a 21-minute “A Closer Look” at President Donald Trump’s inevitable but still shocking attempts to stop every vote from being counted and steal victory away from Joe Biden. And he reserved much of his outrage for Fox News.
As the Late Night host put it, Trump and Fox News have been “priming their audience” with lies about voter fraud for weeks. “And now the moment is here and they’re taking the outrageous and unprecedented step of falsely declaring victory before all the votes are counted.”
“It’s an authoritarian movement intent on detonating our democracy and turning it into an autocracy with a healthy sprinkling of psychosis,” Meyers continued. And he was particularly unnerved by the reaction on Fox to the president’s “incoherent and insane” late-night speech in which he prematurely and falsely declared victory.
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“Sure enough, Fox News picked up on Trump’s line of bullshit as soon as he ended his speech,” the host said, pointing to “ex-Bush hack” Dana Perino, who echoed the president’s suggestion that Pennsylvania would “all of a sudden” find 100,000 votes “in a trashcan” somewhere.
“You ghouls love your evidence-free musings, don’t you?” Meyers asked. “That doesn’t belong in the news. That belongs in a Pennysaver column called ‘Dana’s Digressions.’ There’s literally no proof for what you’re saying. These people are so insane they think election officials are finding ballots the way George Constanza found that eclair.”
From there, Meyers shared more examples of Fox News hosts and commentators spreading disinformation about the near certainty that Joe Biden would overtake Trump in vote counts across several states as all of the ballots were counted. “Counting votes is not finding votes,” the host said patiently. “They’re not scanning the beach with a metal detector. This isn’t a scavenger hunt.”
“Again, they are all valid ballots that are just getting counted the way we always count ballots days or weeks after an election,” Meyers said. “This always happens.”
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