In many people’s eyes, Monday was the day that Seth Meyers officially leapfrogged Jimmy Fallon.
You see, Fallon, ever the inoffensive showman, conducted a softer-than-baby-thighs interview with Donald Trump earlier this week that drew the ire of the left for humanizing the inhuman, with the former SNLer serving up softball questions and fiddling with the hair of a reality show host turned racist birther turned full-on xenophobe who has come dangerously close to the presidency.
The backlash was swift, with many chastising the comedian for abetting a demagogue—something NBC as a whole, aka Trump’s former employer , has done with regularity of late between that SNL hosting gig, Matt Lauer’s pro-Trump debacle of a Commander-in-Chief Forum, and the Fallon gabfest. It’s almost as if the peacock agreed to go easy on Trump as part of his exit agreement after he was fired from overseeing The Celebrity Apprentice and his ridiculous pageants.
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Well, thank goodness for Seth Meyers. Fallon’s Late Night replacement has been tough on Trump from the jump—his 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner roast of Trump, to his increasingly agitated face, remains perhaps the best grilling the orange heir’s ever received—and on Monday night, he went in on Trump’s five-year birther crusade and this week’s half-hearted admission President Obama was, indeed, born in the U.S.
“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it, you know what I mean? President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period,” said Trump, following a thirty-minute infomercial for his new hotel.
“Obama was born in the United States. Period? Fuck you, exclamation point!” shouted Meyers. “You don’t get to peddle racist rhetoric for five years and decide when it’s over. We decide when it’s over! And it’s certainly not over after a thirty-second statement in the middle of a hotel commercial.”
“Obama wasn’t born here is your No. 1 hit,” he added. “Saying you got it from Hillary would be like Springsteen saying he only wrote ‘Born to Run’ because he heard Bon Jovi say it once.”
Now, Trump and his campaign surrogates—including dopey Chris Christie, spin machine Kellyanne Conway, and others—have been trying to Inception the American public into believing that Trump stopped his racist birther crusade all the way back in 2011, after Obama was harassed into providing his long-form birth certificate.
Not so, said Meyers, who then played a montage of clips of Trump questioning Obama’s place of birth from 2011-2015. “He was still saying the birth certificate could be fake last year!” exclaimed Meyers. “And by the way, I’m not sure the guy who holds fake press conferences, has a fake university, a fake foundation, fake hair, and a fake tan should be the one in charge of deciding what’s real.”
Meyers then ran through a series of Trump’s birther tweets from the past five years, including this idiotic gem:
“Let’s just step back here and think about how insane that is,” said Meyers. “Trump thinks the president orchestrated a plane crash so accurate that it only killed the one person who could prove his birth certificate was a fraud. Yeah, just bang the plane against the mountain and land it safely. 12E. We wanna take out 12E.”
“The bottom line is this: Trump built his career on a racist lie because he’s a racist and a liar, and instead of denouncing that lie, the GOP doubled-down on it completely,” he continued. “And now Trump is trying to trick people once again that he was never really a birther at all, and that it was Hillary Clinton that started it.” Yep. Unbelievable.
