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Late-night show hosts reacted to the news that Donald Trump won the presidential race with a mix of humour and disbelief.
“At least there’ll be a peaceful transfer of power,” CBS host Stephen Colbert said as he looked for silver linings in the unexpectedly decisive victory over Vice-President Kamala Harris.
Jimmy Fallon on NBC’s “The Tonight Show” made a similar quip about this being the “first time ever” that Trump will accept the results of an election, after he refused to concede in 2020 and repeatedly questioned the integrity of the 2024 election.
Colbert began “The Late Show” on a sombre note – saying that no one gets into the comedy business “because their life worked out great.”
“We’re built for rough roads,” he said.
The show’s cold open started with a roundup of stunned global reactions to the election result.
“I’ll be in my bedroom making no noise and pretending that I don’t exist,” a young Harry Potter said.
In Italy, the game character Mario exasperatedly declared: “Mamma, mia!”
The Muppets’ Swedish Chef character collapsed in his kitchen, steam spewing from his ears, and a Canadian hockey player attacked the camera with his stick.
“All day yesterday, I was walking around proudly wearing my ‘I voted’ sticker,” Colbert said in his monologue. “Today I wore my ‘I am questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of humanity’ sticker.”
“Now, as a late-night host, people often say to me, ‘Come on, part of you has got to want Trump to win because he gives you so much material to work with,’” Colbert said. “No, no. No one tells the guy who cleans the bathroom: ‘Wow, you must love it when someone has explosive diarrhea. There’s so much material for you to work with,’” he said.
Trump has long been a target of late-night comedy show hosts, who have mocked his age, weight and felon status, his gaffes and foibles. They have also occasionally showed their anger at his actions, such as when they recounted their horror at seeing a mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol. Trump has accused the late-night hosts of “one-sided hatred” toward him, calling their shows “unwatchable” and “very boring.”
Helming “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central was senior correspondent Desi Lydic, who said Trump’s victory was an indictment of American voters.
Describing the aftermath of Election Day as a “waking nightmare,” Lydic opened the show pointing out that “America’s elected its first criminal president before electing its first female president.”
Jimmy Kimmel had a similar quip: “We had the choice between a prosecutor and a criminal and we chose the criminal to be the president of the United States.”
Fallon, who has been criticized in the past for going easy on Trump, jokingly referred in his monologue to the legal issues that had beset the president-elect, including hoarding highly classified documents after leaving the White House.
“Of course, Trump’s already super busy. First he’s got to move all those classified documents back into the White House,” Fallon joked.
The late-night comedians took aim at Trump’s autocratic leanings, even as analysts say much of the electorate sees him as democracy’s saviour.
“He’s a dictator. He’s a fascist. He’s a malignant narcissist whose blood type is fryer oil,” Lydic said. “But it’s pretty clear that America is the one that needs the diagnosis,” after it elected him to a second term.
Kimmel started his skit pretending to be packing to leave the country: “I can’t stay for another four years of this. Who knows what he’s going to do.”
“You’ve heard him. He said he has a list of enemies. You think I’m not on that list?”
Colbert ridiculed an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal titled: “How Risky is a Trump Second Term?”
The authors, he said, “hopefully point out that in the last go-around, the authoritarian rule that the Democrats and the press predicted never appeared because Trump was too undisciplined and his attention span too short.”
“Well, there’s a cup of sunshine. He’s too unfocused to be a fascist,” Colbert said.
Recalling Trump’s campaign stop at a McDonald’s where he manned the fry station, and his arrival at a rally in a garbage truck, Kimmel found one more silver lining, however tongue-in-cheek.
On the upside, Kimmel quipped, “the reason America is the greatest country in the world, is that even a simple garbage man and fry cook from McDonald’s can one day be president of the United States two different times, and I think that’s inspiring.”