Seth Meyers: 'Every minute with Donald Trump feels like a horror movie'

Seth Meyers

On Late Night, Seth Meyers recapped the ever-growing scandal of Trump’s July phone call with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which he leveraged US military aid to ask Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. A whistleblower’s report of the call, and the subsequent White House transcript of its contents, launched the House impeachment inquiry, which was formalized with a vote on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Trump has continued to defend the call as “perfect”, which is increasingly troubling his fellow Republicans. “On one hand, they know what Trump did was wrong, but on the other hand, Trump won’t admit it was wrong,” Meyers explained. “So they have no wiggle room. They’re basically parents sitting in the principal’s office saying ‘I promise our son won’t pull the fire alarm again,’ while the son is sitting next to them saying, ‘Oh yeah, I’m gonna do it again.’”

Related: Stephen Colbert: 'Unlike Trump, Vindman's character is unimpeachable'

According to the Washington Post, Republican congressmen are “exasperated” by the lack of convincing defenses from the White House and damning testimonies from Trump’s administration; one veteran Republican senator compared the impeachment inquiry to “a horror movie”.

Meyers agreed – “every minute with Donald Trump feels like a horror movie” – but also called bullshit: “I’m sorry, you guys don’t get to complain that you’re in a horror movie when you’re the ones who invited the Baba-crook into the White House.”

Stephen Colbert

On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert addressed the testimony Tuesday of Lt Col Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council’s top expert on Ukraine and a firsthand witness to the Zelenskiy call. Vindman “dropped a bombshell”, said Colbert, telling Congress that the transcript released by the White House “omitted crucial words and phrases”.

“This is huge – the White House intentionally left things out,” Colbert marveled. “It’s like the infamous 18-and-a-half-minute gap on Nixon’s Watergate tapes – if Nixon had left in all the bad stuff.

“I mean, for Pete’s sake, how do you edit the transcript and leave in, ‘I’d like you to do us a favor, though?’” Colbert asked. “It’s like a mobster whacking a guy and saying, ‘Don’t worry, cops got nothin’ – we got rid of some of his body.’”

Republicans, meanwhile, are searching for excuses to get Trump out of the impeachment mess, and last week, we got what Colbert called “the desperate-est of all excuses” from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. “If you’re not familiar with the Journal’s editorial board, imagine a retirement home inside a country club inside a gated community in the afterlife full of ghosts who are scared of immigrants,” Colbert explained. In light of mounting evidence of Trump’s quid pro quo request, the Journal argued that he shouldn’t be impeached because “he was too inept to execute it”.

Colbert found the defense laughable, amounting to: “Your honor, my client could’ve committed the murder – he wanted to, don’t get me wrong – but he was just too damn dumb.”

Samantha Bee

On Full Frontal, Samantha Bee addressed the resignation of the California congresswoman Katie Hill after news broke that she had a relationship with one of her campaign staffers. Resigning was “the right thing to do”, said Bee. “You should not have sex with the people who work for you.”

However, Bee continued, Hill is herself a victim of so-called revenge porn – nude images leaked by her estranged husband and published without her consent by the websites Redstate and the Daily Mail, which Bee called “two of the vilest, nastiest things to exist on the internet”.

Revenge porn is a serious issue, Bee explained; according to Slate, 12% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 have had explicit images of them shared without their consent. “That is horrible, but also I am proud to live in a country where people take that many intimate photos of themselves,” Bee said. “Get down with your bad self America!”

In all seriousness, though “the issue isn’t with people taking nude pictures,” Bee explained. “The issue is with people who share them without consent.” The name “revenge porn” is itself a problem; many states require that the victim prove that the person who released the images did so maliciously, which is “a very high bar”, said Bee. “Revenge is not always the motivation for sharing someone else’s nudes. There’s also horniness, boredom, greed and boasting – which is, coincidentally, the special skills section of Trump’s résumé.”

Bee said pointed to an Illinois law which bases the crime on a victim’s consent (or lack thereof). It would be great if all states took this as seriously as Illinois, said Bee, and “since the internet doesn’t stop at the state border, a federal law would be great, too”.

Trevor Noah

On the Daily Show, Trevor Noah turned from impeachment to another pressing topic: former White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s run on Dancing with the Stars. Spicer initially defended his casting as a chance to transcend politics, and “believe it or not,” said Noah, “since he joined the cast of Dancing with the Stars, Sean Spicer has brought everyone together – it’s just to laugh at his terrible dancing.

“Sean Spicer has clearly been the worst dancer on the show, and possibly in history, ever,” Noah continued. “He’s been getting the lowest scores, and should’ve been gone a long time ago.” But the show factors in both scores and viewer votes, and “once it became clear that he wasn’t going to win over the judges, Sean Spicer decided screw the whole political kumbaya crap.” Instead, he went on Breitbart to advocate for his reality-show run as a front in the conservative culture war.

There are a lot of issues with this strategy, Noah said. “First of all, people on the left don’t care if a conservative wins Dancing With the Stars. Trust me, when it comes to the liberal agenda, dancing does not make the list.”

More importantly, “he is ruining Dancing with the Stars for a lot of its fans who genuinely want to watch good dancing. This is not supposed to be about politics; it’s about talent. And a guy who dances with the elegance of a dial-up modem logging into AOL does not deserve to win.”

Noah takes the issue personally as a former contestant on the South African version of the show. “I’m proud to say that I kicked ass because I worked hard at it, so if Sean Spicer’s going to destroy one of the greatest, most respected institutions in the world, I have no choice but to defend it’s honor,” Noah joked as he stripped off his suit to reveal a leopard-print dancing leotard.