Late-night hosts responded to the Trump administration’s escalation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) action in Minneapolis and its criminal investigation into the Fed chair, Jerome Powell.
Jimmy Kimmel
Jimmy Kimmel opened Tuesday’s monologue with a summary of “another bananas speech” by Donald Trump – this time at the Detroit Economic Club, where he tried to convince attenders that the protests in Minneapolis over the ICE shooting of Renee Good were “fake”.
“They’re not riots, they’re real,” Kimmel responded. “First they want us to believe that we did not see what we all saw happen to Renee Good. Now he wants us to believe that the protests aren’t real. It’s like the emperor’s new clothes in reverse – he’s telling us we’re the ones who are naked, while they do their best to cover everything up.
“Not only has the Trump administration iced local authorities out of the FBI investigation into the killing of Renee Good,” he continued, but on Tuesday, six senior prosecutors quit after being pressured by the justice department to investigate Good’s widow, who was in the car when she was shot. “They’re investigating the victims instead of the perpetrator,” the host lamented.
On Tuesday morning, Trump posted an escalation on Truth Social: “Do the people of Minnesota really want to live in a community in which there are thousands of already convicted murderers, drug dealers and addicts, rapists, violent released and escaped prisoners, dangerous people from foreign mental institutions and insane asylums, and other deadly criminals too dangerous to even mention.”
“What could be more dangerous than a murderer rapist escaped from an insane asylum?” Kimmel wondered. “But fear not, great people of Minnesota, the day of reckoning and retribution is coming! Does anyone else miss the days when the president didn’t sound like the undertaker at WrestleMania?
“I mean seriously, would someone get this hypoglycemic five-year-old a fidget spinner?” he added. “He needs something to do with his hands.”
Stephen Colbert
“It’s one thing when the Trump administration comes after our rights, or comes after our ideals,” said Stephen Colbert on the Late Show. “But now he’s coming after something we care about: our money.
“And right now, make no mistake, our money is under attack,” he continued, referring to the Trump administration’s presumed prosecution of Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve. “The Fed was established specifically to be an independent agency outside of political pressure,” he said. “That’s what keeps the entire global financial system from collapsing, and all of us going back to bartering with bales of indigo and little bags of toddler teeth.
“So that could be bad,” he quipped, citing a Politico report that even White House insiders are nervous about threats to the Fed chief’s job spooking the bond market.
The host then pivoted to the administration’s deployment of 2,000 federal ICE agents in Minnesota in response to protests over ICE’s killing of Renee Good as she drove home from dropping her child off at school. Trump has since announced plans to send 1,000 more ICE agents. “So he’s clearly invading Minnesota,” said Colbert. “Has anyone told him that they don’t have oil? Because the best he’s going to get is 50m barrels of cream of mushroom soup.
“If you’ve been on social media, you’ve seen all the terrible activity these officers have been up to: pulling people from vehicles, raiding homes and schools and threatening and then delivering violence. But on the bright side, you may also have seen this,” he said before a clip of an ICE officer running and then wiping out on an icy sidewalk.
On a more serious note, “it’s not just a surge of goons,” the host explained. “In order to justify the unjustifiable gunning down of an American citizen in her car, the Trump administration is trying to smear Renee Good’s family.” The justice department pressed for a criminal investigation into Good’s widow, prompting six federal prosecutors in Minnesota to resign. “Good for them. But this story is so awful that even their principled stand doesn’t make me feel better,” Colbert said … before playing the clip of the falling ICE agent again.
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers checked in with Trump, who visited his dentist in Florida over the weekend. “It was just a standard checkup. He got a cleaning, a fluoride treatment, and another cognitive test,” Meyers joked. “A Florida dentist – or, as it’s also known, a toothpick.”
Meanwhile, the White House tweeted a graphic of the health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, that said: “We are ending the war on protein.”
“Finally, finally, we can all say ‘merry protein’ again,” Meyers joked.
“Are you also ending the war in lightbulbs?” he added, referring to Kennedy’s over-shaded appearance in the graphic. “Seriously, do we not have a brighter photo of this guy?”
And the Florida DMV recently released its list of rejected vanity license plates, which included “sexxx” – “because they saw his car, and they knew he wasn’t having any”, Meyers quipped next to a photo of Elon Musk’s Tesla cybertruck.
