Late-night hosts discussed Democrats’ runaway success, while Trump shirked responsibility for Republican losses
Late-night hosts reacted to Democrats’ rout of Republicans in midterm elections across the country as Donald Trump blamed everyone but himself.
Seth Meyers
“Guys, I’ll be honest, I was all prepared to come out here and say something like ‘look, there was a lot of hype, and Democrats didn’t live up to expectations, but narrowly retaking the House is still a good thing,’” said Seth Meyers on Wednesday’s Late Night, a day after voters elected Democrats en masse in races across the country. “Because waiting for the Democrats to have success can make you feel like you’re Matt Damon trying to grow a shit potato on Mars.
“But last night, it was potatoes for everybody!” he cheered, noting surprise blue waves in traditionally red states like Texas, South Carolina and Iowa. “Finally, the polls underestimated Democrats for a change. Say goodbye to the shy Trump voter in Michigan and say hello to the shy woke voter in Texas.”
Of course, not everyone was thrilled by the results. Meyers played a clip of the Fox News host Sean Hannity still defending Trump amid the mass repudiation, claiming: “I think the hatred for this man is unprecedented.”
“I’m with Sean on this point,” Meyers responded. “Why do you nasty, radical socialists hate this man so much? Is it because he lies, and cheats and steals? Is it because he calls some of you jihadists, or traitors, or scum, or vermin, or enemies of the people, or thugs? Is it because he threatens to jail you, or deport you, or take your money, or send you to war, or because when a person he doesn’t like dies he says stuff like, ‘Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!’ Is that why you hate him?
“Now that I’m hearing myself say that, I get why you hate him,” he quipped.
But jokes aside, Meyers concluded, the message was clear: “Voters have fully and unequivocally repudiated Trump and his Maga movement.”
Jimmy Kimmel
On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host once again celebrated voters’ widespread rejection of Trump-backed candidates in midterm races across the country. “Last night, America treated Donald Trump like he was the East Wing of the White House,” Kimmel quipped. “We did it! Transgender for everyone.
“Whether it was a blue wave or blue-nami or a blue-kake, Donald Trump blew it last night,” he added.
Not that Trump would admit it. “In the face of defeat, he is doing what he does best: blaming everyone other than him,” Kimmel noted. In several social media posts, Trump took shots at the defeated Texas governor, Greg Abbott, a “RINO in the last six months of his Political Life” and Fox News, among others. And he tried to absolve himself of all responsibility for the midterms losses. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he wrote on Truth Social.
“Oh shut up. Just shut up!” Kimmel responded. “Give us a break for one day and shut that ridiculous mouth. You are such a spoiled child. Did you ever learn anything about manners or sportsmanship or simple common decency? Nothing is ever your fault. Every Republican pretty much everywhere, everywhere but the deepest of the deep red sea, lost. That’s not because of you? All of your big hand-picked candidates lost. You picked Darline Graham to run in South Carolina, you ran Thom Tillis out of the Senate. You backed that pathetic Ken Paxton in Texas. You went all in on Vivek Ramaswamy and his disgusting campaign ad.
“And if you hadn’t picked Mr Charisma JD Vance to be your vice-president, Republicans would still have that Senate seat they lost in Ohio last night,” he continued. “But if you were on the ballot, they would’ve won in a landslide. That is such crap. You were on the ballot. You’re like dog hair – you’re on everything.”
Kimmel also directed a message to “all those Republicans who voted for him the first time and then the second time and then the third time and decided yesterday that you’d had enough: thank you. It’s hard to admit you made a mistake. Good for you for doing that.
“And for all those ass-kissers and cowards who stood behind him and nodded while he said and did all this crazy stuff that you knew was crazy because you were too scared to say anything: now you see he has no loyalty to anyone other than himself,” he added. “He isn’t just going to throw you under the bus, he’s going to drive it. He’s going to drive over you and then put the bus in reverse and do it again.”
The Daily Show
And on The Daily Show, Michael Kosta tried to find a word to describe the scale of Trump’s loss on Tuesday night. “It was a rebuke. A repudiation. A rejection. A … really bad result. I ran out of ‘re-’ words,” he said.
“But of course, that’s just almost everyone’s opinion,” he continued. “If there’s anyone brave enough to offer a different theory of these midterms?”
Donald Trump, for one. On Truth Social, the president posted: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
“Wow, that is the energy of someone who completely unasked, loudly announced that he was not the one who clogged the toilet,” Kosta joked. “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Trump didn’t help matters when, on Wednesday morning, he gathered reporters at the White House not to react to the election, but to spend 25 minutes talking about the final steel beam going into his new White House ballroom, which he signed with a giant black sharpie. “Ah, just two more years of this, everybody,” Kosta sighed.
