Oh, dang. There wasn’t a new episode of Last Week Tonight last night. That leaves a huge hole in our coverage plans for today. Shit.
Okay, so Friday night Seth Meyers took another closer look (perhaps an even closer look?) at Trump’s continued coronavirus lies. Did you know that the president went on Fox News and said the virus was going away and that “it will go away like things go away” and that we should thus get back to normal life—and that he said this not just five months ago, but last week? COVID-19 is killing a thousand Americans a day, has infected 5 million of us, and is predicted to have killed almost 300,000 total by December 1, and yet our president still claims it’s just going to somehow disappear—half a year and over 160,000 deaths after he first said that.
Trump pushed that witless fantasy while calling for schools to reopen in full. Over the last two weeks of July almost 100,000 children tested positive for COVID-19. During the deadliest pandemic we’ve seen in a century our president is calling for schools to reopen, which would spread the virus throughout America like wildfire, from student to student, to teachers and administration, to bus drivers and custodians and food service workers, and then to all of their families and roommates at home. This is obscene.
But hey, comedy. Yeah, this is what Seth Meyers does, tell jokes about the deadly incompetent buffoon in charge of this country, on a late night talk show produced by the same man who gave Trump a free 90-minute campaign ad on Saturday Night Live back in 2015. Meyers makes some good points that are bleakly funny in this video, and here’s a key quote for you, in case you don’t feel like clicking the play button:
If you’re a New York City real estate crook like Trump, things really do just go away, because you probably have a bunch of criminal goons around you to make them go away.
Meyers doesn’t restrict his criticisms to Trump himself, though, pointing out how his presidency is basically the culmination of the Republican Party’s ideologically-driven, anti-fact platform over the last several decades. As Meyers notes, Trump’s “lawlessness, racism, sociopathic incompetence are endemic to the entirety of the modern Republican party”—which, considering it’s one of only two parties our system is apparently capable of supporting, proves that more than just the Republican Party needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Anyway, check the video out below, and, uh, have as good a week as possible, I guess.