It seems like every day brings a new quote from Donald Trump for people to fixate on, and it was pretty obvious what Monday’s was as soon as he said it. During a discussion about school shootings with state governors at the White House, Trump said the following: “I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.” And Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah had a field day with it.
The hypothetical situation came up after Trump had some harsh words for the sheriff’s deputy who was present at the time of the shooting but stayed outside. Trump offered up the comment about what he would have done, and the aforementioned late-night hosts took exception to the idea that Trump was somehow braver than that deputy.
“It would be ridiculous coming from anyone, but especially from Trump. He’s gonna run in?” Noah said in the opening segment of “The Daily Show Monday night.
“Yo, when Trump ran for president that was the first time he ran in his entire life! Com on, man. You’re telling me this guy,” Noah said while pointing to that old viral video of Trump flinching hard when a bald eagle pecked at him, “is brave enough to run into a school shooting? This guy? Really? The same guy who clung to a Secret Service agent like he was the last life vest on the Titanic? That guy? That guy? Really, Trump cares so much about helping people that he’d jump into the middle of a school shooting with nothing but his fun-sized fists? Really? That guy?”
Noah also devised a hypothetical of his own: what actually would happen if Trump ran inside the school while the emergency was ongoing.
“To be fair, if Donald Trump ran into a school during a shooting, I do believe he would actually stop the shooting,” Noah said. “Because imagine you’re a school shooter and Donald Trump appears in the hallway. How distracting would that be.”
Then Noah did an impression of Trump managing to essentially stun the shooter into submission by going on and on about his Electoral College victory.
“It’d just be like, ‘That’s right, it’s me, Donald Trump! I don’t have a gun but what I do have is an amazing Electoral College victory. They said I couldn’t win. 736 college — I did it. I did it so good.’ Like eight minutes later the police show up, Trump is still talking, the kid is like ‘what the hell is happening here?!’ It would work!”
You can watch Noah’s bit on “The Daily Show” right here.
On “Late Night,” meanwhile, host Seth Meyers devoted time to Trump’s comment in two different segments, first during his monologue and later during a big picture commentary looking at the whole of the conservative response to the Parkland shooting and the ensuing fallout.
Here’s Meyers’ quip from his monologue: “I gotta say I find it hard to believe Trump would voluntarily run inside a place of education. The only way you would run inside is if a reporter asked you a question outside.”
He went on a bit longer doing the later segment, dubbed “A Closer Look.”
“Nothing about that is believable. Forget running into a school to confront a shooter, I don’t believe you’d run anywhere, period. You can’t even be bothered to walk down a flight of stairs,” Meyers said while playing a clip of Trump riding an escalator down. “Then again, I said before that I didn’t think you’d run and man did I get burned.”
From there, Meyers inserted Trump into the Liam Neeson movie “Taken,” saying that flick would have gone very differently if Trump was put in that scenario.
“There’s really nothing worse than a fake tough guy. Trump lives in a fantasy world where he’s some kind of action movie star who’d rush into danger and save the day. I’m sorry, but you’re not exactly Liam Neeson. If you’d been in the movie ‘Taken’ they would have had to change the name,” Meyers said as the shot switched to an altered version of the “Taken” poster featuring Trump and a new title: “My Daughter’s Gone, Let’s Move On.”
Meyers then did an impression of Trump taking the call from the kidnappers that inspired all those memes back when the movie came out and for years after thanks to Neeson’s fierce delivery of the line: “I will find you, and I will kill you.”
“All right, so you have her?” Meyers’ impersonation of Trump said. “Okay, thanks for the call.”
You can watch the entire “A Closer Look” segment right here.
Colbert spent almost all of his “Late Show” monologue on Trump, and he had so much material that he didn’t get to the “run in there” quote until he was several minutes in.
“There’s a lot in there that I doubt, but the part that I really don’t believe is that he can run. I just don’t see it.”
Colbert then reminded the audience of the biggest reason to doubt his claim that he would have tried to be a hero had he been at Stoneman Douglas that day.
“Look, sir, we already know how you react to combat situations. You got five deferments from Vietnam. What are you gonna do, run in there and stab them with your bone spurs?” Colbert said, referring to the story of how Trump avoided being drafted by claiming medical deferments for bone spurs in his foot.
“‘I could have won Vietnam,’” Colbert continued, doing a Trump impression. “‘No weapon, just run right up to Ho Chi Minh and karate chopped him in the clavicle. Okay. Nixon’s still president.’”
You can watch Colbert’s monologue below.