Seth Meyers returned from a two-week vacation Monday night and delivered a doozy of “A Closer Look” segment to start his first show back. At 14 minutes, it was not only one of his longest segments ever, it was also one of his most scathing.
This was the Late Night host’s first crack at the still-growing scandal surrounding Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer, and he did not hold back. After getting through some jokes about President Trump “pretending to do his job” by sitting in a fire truck and putting on a cowboy hat, Meyers arrived at the main event, quoting the White House official who told The Daily Beast of Trump Jr.’s possible collusion, “This is sum of all fears stuff. It’s what we’ve all been dreading.”
“Maybe you’ve been dreading it, but the rest of us have been waiting for it like the new season of Game of Thrones,” Meyers said, noting that Trump Jr. “kept lying” about the details of the meeting as more revelations came out in the press.
“He changed his story four times in four days,” the host added. “That’s like if your wife asked, ‘Where were you last night?’ and you said, ‘I was at work, I mean I was working, at a co-worker’s house, at a friend’s house, at a female friend’s house, in a female friend’s bed — but nothing came of it!’”
And when Trump Jr. appeared on Hannity last week, he insisted, “This is everything.”
“Great, so he may have changed his story four times in four days, but now everything’s out there and there are no more undisclosed details, got it?” Meyers said in response. “This has been a closer… what?!” he added before revealing the new information that came out after that Fox interview about a Russian lobbyist who was accused in an international hacking conspiracy.
“You know what? At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if we found out that Putin himself was at this meeting,” Meyers said. “The only member of the Trump Team who I’m sure didn’t meet with the Russians was Eric.” Because of these “changing stories and constant lies,” he said lawmakers are starting to “escalate” the Russian investigation and call Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and others to testify in front of Congress.
Meyers went on to mock the “increasingly ridiculous” excuses by the Trump administration for Trump Jr.’s meeting, including the president himself who chalked it up to “politics” as usual. “No it’s not,” Meyers said. “Politics is running attack ads and kissing babies and going down on a corndog at the Iowa State Fair. Just because something is political doesn’t mean it’s just politics. If John Wilkes Booth had shot Lincoln and said, ‘Hey, that’s politics,’ they still would have arrested him.”