Late-night hosts delved into the new US regime-change war in the Middle East, after Donald Trump directed the US military to bomb Iran in conjunction with Israel.
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart opened The Daily Show on Monday in a daze, after Iran state media confirmed that US and Israeli forces killed its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, over the weekend. The host joked that, for the surprise occasion and chaos that followed, he needed to bring back “a 20-year recurring segment” titled “Mess O’Potamia”.
“America, apparently, had to start an entire war to kill an 86-year-old man in ill health and not wait – I don’t know – three weeks to let saturated fat do its thing,” he joked.
He then played a clip of Trump, wearing his USA hat, announcing the so-called “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran from his luxury golf course in Florida.
“This is how we’re doing this?” Stewart wondered. “2am, Mar-a-Lago basement. No lighting? You don’t have one of those influencer halo things? And this is what we’re wearing? Blazer, no tie, shirt unbuttoned? Looking more like the father of the bride settling up with the caterer? Is that what we’re doing? And not to nitpick, obviously, but baseball hat? We’re going with a baseball hat for a war of choice?
“You could have done this at the White House in a suit in the ‘I killed Bin Laden hallway’,” he continued. “But no. You decided to go with vacation house, trucker hat, guy who’s about to make an announcement at his club’s member-member tournament. It’s classy.”
Trump spent little energy justifying the war to the American people. Instead, he let his defense secretary, former Fox News morning show host Pete Hegseth, defensively defend the military actions to a pre-approved set of rightwing media.
“I can’t think of anything more dismissive and arrogant than this president not directly addressing the American people and explaining this war more thoroughly,” said Stewart.
After a series of clips of said rightwing media rationalizing the same regime-change meddling they once denounced, Stewart could only marvel at “how quickly the right has gone from peace through strength to peace through war”.
“And we’re all just along for the ride, in a war with no clear purpose, no end in sight,” he added. “It’s all just at the whims of Donald Trump.”
Jimmy Kimmel
“I used to say the one thing that surprised me about Donald Trump, in a good way, is that he hadn’t gotten us into any wars,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Monday evening. “Now there’s nothing good about him. It’s zero.”
Operation Epic Fury is “different from its original title, which was Operation Epsteino Distracton”, he quipped.
“I think we could all probably agree that the world’s a better place without the Ayatollah,” Kimmel said. “But no one seems to understand why it was so urgent that we attack immediately. They got no approval from Congress. Even Ted Cruz said he saw no indication that Iran was close to getting nuclear weapons. And wasn’t Donald Trump supposed to be the president of peace?
“Trump has been now, after the bombing, calling for the Iranian people to rise up to topple the regime, which is the opposite of what he said he would do,” Kimmel added. “He usually only calls for the overthrow of a government when he loses an election.”
But Kimmel had a theory for why now: “When your best friend was a pedophile, and you’re losing bigly in the swing states with an election coming up, what do you do? I’ll tell you what you do: you fire the weapons of mass distraction.”
Seth Meyers
Now that Ayatollah Khamenei is dead, “the question is: what happens next? Who takes over in Iran?” said Seth Meyers on Late Night. Trump told the New York Times he has “three very good choices” for who could lead the country, but then he claimed that the attack killed all of his potential candidates. In some interviews, he said the campaign would be over in three to frive days; in others, he said it’d take at least a few weeks.
But don’t worry, Meyers sarcastically assured. The president won’t get bored. “There’s nothing boring about this,” Trump said at a White House press conference about the military operations, which devolved into a classic Trump ramble about his White House ballroom construction project.
“Literally bombs are falling all over the Middle East, and he’s complaining about construction sounds,” Meyers marveled. “But for anyone who’s already worrying about the cost of another war, did you factor in the money he’s saving on curtains?
“The thing that strikes me as especially weird about this is how little effort Trump is putting into even trying to convince anyone, any of us, that this war no one asked for is a good idea,” he added. “Trump and his supporters claimed that he was against regime change wars and nation-building abroad. He called himself a candidate of peace, which was ludicrous then and is even more ridiculous now. But now his Maga base has to get on board with the neocon version of Trump they pretended didn’t exist.”
Stephen Colbert
“We now face an unpredictable and unstable situation” said Stephen Colbert on the Late Show. “Fun fact: Epic Fury is an anagram for Forget Epstein.
“I want to point out that an open-ended war of choice in the Middle East with no clear exit strategy or defined victory is where I got on this train,” the host continued. (The satirical Colbert Report, if you recall, began airing in 2005, during the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the “war on terror”.) “And in the last 25 years of talking about this stuff on TV, I have learned not to stand up and say it like Moses on the mountaintop on day three of a new war whether this is going to be a good or this is gonna be a bad.
“But I will definitely say that we have no clear idea where this is going or why it’s going there,” he continued. “Now, say what you want about George W Bush, and I did. He sold his Middle East war. That’s what the W stood for: Middle East – he was not a smart man.”
Bush “went to the UN, he went to Congress, he gave speeches for a year leading up to it. He sent Colin Powell to the UN with a vial of what appears to be Country Time Lemonade,” he continued, referring to Powell’s infamous and ultimately false claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
“Compare that to the present Potus,” Colbert continued. “Six days ago, he gave what is officially the longest State of the Union address of all time, and the subject of Iran was a drive-by. In a two-hour speech, he gave it three minutes. The man’s had longer farts.”
Only after the strikes did Trump attempt to justify them. Speaking from the White House, he called Iran “an intolerable threat to not only the Middle East but also the American people, our country itself would be under threat. And it was very nearly under threat.”
“‘Very nearly under threat’ is very nearly a good reason to send our troops into harm’s way,” said Colbert, reminding that six US service members had already died in Trump’s war. “That sacrifice and any sacrifices to come – any loss of civilian life, for that matter – deserve clarity from our leaders as to why that sacrifice is being asked. Because this war is on, and it seems like there could be more of it.”
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