On Thursday, Beto O’Rourke, the 46-year-old former Democratic congressman from Texas—and failed 2018 Senate candidate—finally declared his presidential candidacy. It was, to be sure, fairly anticlimactic given the weeks of not-so-subtle hints.
“Look, I’m a little upset it took Beto this long to announce because if he’d done it in 2008, I definitely could have played him on SNL,” joked Seth Meyers.
The Late Night host dedicated the bulk of his “A Closer Look” segment to Beto’s 2020 announcement, including his curious decision to do so via a profile in the posh publication Vanity Fair, written by Joe Hagan and shot by Annie Leibovitz.
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In the piece, Beto was asked why he wanted to run for president and responded, “I think I’d be good at it. I want to be in it… Man, I’m just born to be in it.”
“I’m sorry, nobody is born to be president,” said Meyers. “Nobody is born to be anything. Springsteen said he was ‘born to run’ and then he wrote 400 songs about New Jersey. I mean look at Trump—he wasn’t born to be president. If he was born to be anything it was selling fake Rolexes in Times Square.”
Beto also opened up to Vanity Fair about his Senate race, where he lost to one of the more unlikable politicians in Washington: Ted Cruz. He said he was guided “by some greater force,” and “Everything that I said, I was like, watching myself, being like, ‘How am I saying this stuff? Where is this coming from?’”
“Now, in the run-up to 2020, we here at Late Night, we’re going to try really hard and we’re going to ask ourselves, ‘Would we make fun of Trump if he said that?’” offered Meyers, before repeating Beto’s head-scratching quote in Trump’s voice. “That was fucking weird,” he concluded. “Seriously, I did not know that weed was legal in Texas.”
