Just when you thought you had already reached information overload during this coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump tweeted “OBAMAGATE” on Sunday. Folks have understandably struggled to make sense of that whole thing, and Seth Meyers spent a good portion of Wednesday’s edition of “A Closer Look” discussing what Meyers referred to as a “fake scandal.”
“The porridge-brained adult toddler who’s in charge of keeping us all safe has spent the last few days obsessively rage tweeting vague conspiracy theories about his predecessor. Like when he tweeted out the words ‘Obamagate’ in all caps. And when he was asked to explain what the so-called Obamagate scandal he keeps tweeting about actually was, he just couldn’t.”
“Late Night” then played a clip of reporters asking Trump on Monday to explain what Obamagate is. And he replied like so: “It’s been going on for a long time. It’s been going on from before I even got elected. And it’s a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what’s going on and if you look at now all of this information that’s being released. And from what I understand that’s only the beginning. Some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen on our country again. And you’ll be seeing what’s going on over the next, over the coming weeks, but I wish you’d write honestly about it, but unfortunately you choose not to do so.”
When the reporter followed up to ask for any kind of specific specific information, Trump simply said: “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody.”
“No. We don’t,” Meyers said after the clip finished. “Apparently neither do you. Trump’s so lazy he can’t even be bothered to come up with the details of his own fake scandal anymore.”
Meyers continued: “Trump says ‘Obamagate’ like he’s playing a version of Taboo where the only words that aren’t forbidden are ‘Obama’ and ‘gate’… And now the president’s allies in the GOP and right wing media are actually calling on the department of justice to prosecute Obama officials and possibly even Obama himself for whatever the hell Obamagate is supposed to be.”
You can watch all the 16-minute “A Closer Look” segment from Wednesday’s episode of “Late Night With Seth Meyers” in the video embedded up at the top of this post.