During the 2016 Republican National Convention, then-presidential nominee Donald Trump infamously addressed the problems facing our nation—declaring, “I alone can fix it.” Four years later, as the coronavirus pandemic created a global health crisis not seen in a century and left states scrambling for life-saving health care equipment, Trump has seemed a bit less enthusiastic about taking the reins. “We’re a backup. Remember, we’re a backup,” the president said at a recent press conference about the federal government’s responsibility, a sentiment he also echoed on Twitter.
“Trump thought he alone could fix it, until he saw what it was,” joked an outraged Seth Meyers on Thursday’s episode of Late Night. During his Closer Look segment, the host again blasted Trump for abdicating responsibility for his administration’s failed response to the coronavirus outbreak, paying particular interest to the president’s recent attempts to brush past the health crisis even as it has claimed more than 17,000 American lives. “Trump is rushing to pretend this will all go away, and hoping people will forget that,” Meyers said.
At a press conference last month, Trump said, “Ultimately, the goal is to ease the guidelines and open things up to very large sections of our country as we near the end of our historic battle with the invisible enemy. There’s tremendous hope as we look forward and we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
It’s a comment he’s echoed as recently as this week on Twitter. “LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL!” Trump wrote Monday on social media. Then on Wednesday, the president tweeted, “Once we OPEN UP OUR GREAT COUNTRY, and it will be sooner rather than later, the horror of the Invisible Enemy, except for those that sadly lost a family member or friend, must be quickly forgotten. Our Economy will BOOM, perhaps like never before!!!”
“I love that Hold-a-Grudge Jones over here is telling us we have to forget it and move on,” Meyers said in response to the Trump remarks. “The same guy who is still so mad at John McCain that he tweeted McCain was last in his class at Annapolis seven months after he died. This bullshit is the same as people who act terribly and then when you point out their terrible behavior cry, what of civility? Civility isn’t a right, it’s earned. And sometimes people don’t deserve it just like people don’t deserve to have their bad decisions lost to history.”
Meyers was particularly angered by Trump’s request that the pandemic should be “quickly forgotten.”
“Trump is like an employee at Wendy’s who gets fired, shows up drunk in the middle of the night, takes a shit in the Frostee machine, scribbles ‘Donald Was Here’ and passes out naked in the parking lot. And when the cops come to arrest him says, ‘Guys, that was all yesterday. Let’s move on.’”
Meyers has repeatedly hammered Trump and his administration for their coronavirus response since his late-night return, and the host’s palpable anger and pointed commentary have been hailed as a highlight of the current talk-show landscape. “I don’t think I’ve ever watched one of his press conferences, especially about this, and thought in real time, Oh, that one’s going to be good for the show,” Meyers told Vanity Fair in an interview this week, adding that the press conferences usually conflict with feeding his children dinner. “I enjoy feeding my children dinner more than I enjoy watching the president. And by the way,” he joked, “I don’t enjoy feeding them dinner that much.”
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