With most late-night hosts on holiday, Seth Meyers mocked Donald Trump’s secondhand Nobel peace prize and his incoherent logic for taking over Greenland.
Seth Meyers
Seth Meyers returned to the Late Night desk on Monday evening – Martin Luther King Jr Day in the US, for which other late-night shows remained on break – with a quick rundown of yet another weekend of unfathomably stupid updates from the White House.
In the past few days, Trump “threatened to invade Greenland, which is a part of Denmark, because he didn’t win the Nobel peace prize, which he thinks is decided by Norway, which it’s not”, Meyers said. “For more on this, it’s time for ‘Seth Rubs His Temples and Tries to Dissociate for 15 Minutes.’
“The news has once again gotten dumber and more exhausting,” he continued. “Just another day living in Donald Trump’s snow globe, where the snow is cocaine and it never stops shaking.”
“America’s been through a lot over the years, but the one thing we’ve mercifully never had to deal with was a president who had a boner for winning awards,” he added. “You’re the president of the United States – that should be reward enough! This guy gets elected, and his next thought is ‘better make room in the trophy case.’”
Nevertheless, Trump exhibited a “desperate craving for awards”, particularly the Nobel peace prize – a snub he somehow connects to Greenland, though the Nobel committee in fact exists in Norway and has nothing to do with the semi-autonomous territory managed by Denmark.
“It shouldn’t be this hard to make sense of what the president says and does on a daily basis,” Meyers noted after a clip of one news anchor trying to connect the dots. “Following Trump’s logic is like getting way too high and staring at a magic eye poster. But then it turns out it’s not even a magic eye poster, there’s no hidden image, it’s just a bunch of random letters. Turns out it’s an eye chart and you’re just totally baked at Warby Parker again.”
In an open letter to the Norwegian prime minister, Trump claimed he should have won the peace prize because he “stopped 8 wars PLUS” and used the snub as justification for his threats to take over Greenland, because “the world is not secure unless we have complete and total control of Greenland”.
“I love that he’s basically saying, ‘Here’s how important Greenland is. If you’d given me a shiny new medal, I would have let you have it,’” Meyers responded.
“Also, ‘you didn’t give me the Nobel peace prize, so now I have to invade another country’ is an insane thing to say,” he added. “That’s like if I said to my kids, ‘You didn’t get me a World’s #1 Dad coffee mug, so I’m moving to Thailand to blow your inheritance, Sam Rockwell in White Lotus style.”
The ruckus escalated on Friday, when the actual recipient of the Nobel peace prize, the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, gave her medal to Trump in an attempt to curry favor with the man who authorized the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro and claims to be the “acting president” of Venezuela. (The Nobel committee, for what it’s worth, is not happy about it.)
“He actually accepted a secondhand Nobel peace prize – with someone else’s name on it,” Meyers laughed. “That’s like if John Oliver offered me one of his Last Week Tonight Emmys, and I accepted it.”
Taken together, Meyers only saw an absolute mess. “We used to be a country of laws and norms and independent agencies, co-equal branches of government,” he concluded. “It was imperfect, it was flawed, but the president had to operate within a system. His impulses were constrained. Now we live in a cocaine snow globe that shakes with the arbitrary whims of one man.”
