When Seth Meyers taped Thursday’s episode of Late Night, he probably couldn’t have guessed that mere hours later, President Donald Trump would announce that he had tested positive for the coronavirus.
Indeed, Meyers opened his latest edition of A Closer Look with a clip of Trump at a rally the host described as “one of his all-you-can-eat COVID buffets.”
“What are they going to do when in eight, 12, maybe 16 years, I say, let’s hang it up,” Trump said on Wednesday night. “16 more years?”
“Another 16 years?” Meyers said in disbelief on Thursday. “The last four have already felt like 16. Sixteen more would feel like 64.”
Still, as Meyers said earlier in the week, it’s the voters who will presumably have a say in the end of Trump’s administration. “That’s what Tuesday’s debate was about,” Meyers said. “That’s why Trump and his allies have been lashing out at everyone, including the moderator, Fox News host Chris Wallace, after the negative reaction to Trump’s grotesque performance.”
“I was debating two people last night,” Trump falsely claimed during his Wednesday night rally. He then tried to connect violent crime with debate rules. “Arson’s okay, but challenging Sleepy Joe is totally off-limits.”
In the wake of the debate, Wallace called the event a “terrible missed opportunity” and laid the blame for its failures at the president’s feet. On Thursday, in an interview with Fox News, Wallace said Trump “bears the primary responsibility for what happened.”
Whether the next two debates happen as scheduled is uncertain, thanks to Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis. But the events are set for October 15 and October 22 and, this week, the Commission on Presidential Debates said it was considering changes to the format to prevent the broad interruptions Trump forced on the proceedings.
“I’d just like to say to them, best of luck,” Meyers joked on Thursday. “You know the format’s not the problem, right? It’s not like it’s hard to follow the rules. I mean, she did it.” He then showed a photo of former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Meyers added, “What are you going to do, cut his mic? At this point, if you took his mic away, he’d probably just grow a new one, Terminator-style.”
No, Meyers claimed, in his estimation, there is only one way to get Trump to “behave at debates.”
“if no one else will say it, I will,” Meyers said. “Any time he breaks the rules, a hologram of Fred Trump should appear and say, ‘What part of wait your turn don’t you understand, Donald?’” He then imitated a sniveling Trump: “I’m sorry, papa, I’m just in so over my head, and you’re not here to bail me out.”
Trump’s relationship with his late father has been well-documented, most recently in a tell-all book by the president’s niece, Mary Trump. In Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, Mary claimed the president’s father “short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it.”