“Late Night With Seth Meyers” returned to its studio at 30 Rock in NYC on Tuesday — without an audience, of course. But aside from the changed setting, Meyers was still in quarantine mode, complete with an appearance by the sea captain from his in-laws’ house and a super-sized, 15-minute edition of “A Closer Look” in which he accused Trump, the Republicans and conservative media outlets of crafting a fake reality in which “Coronavirus is over, the economy is back, and a president who brags about arms sales is anti-war.”
In particular, Meyers focused on the story that dominated the weekend news cycle: that report that Donald Trump said all American soldiers who died in war are “losers.”
“The story about Trump denigrating Americans who died or were wounded in war is such a perfect window into the reality distortion machine on the right. Because even Fox News, whose own national security reporter Jennifer Griffin confirmed the story, has sought to undercut it. Here’s how Fox treated the story after Griffin confirmed it with her own reporting,” Meyers said.
Then “Late Night” pulled up a montage of Fox News correspondents questioning the validity of those reports, including one bit where anchor Jon Scott said to Pete Buttigieg: “You wrote, ‘there are no words for how disgusting and dishonorable this is.’ My question to you is: how do you know it’s accurate? How do you know it’s true?
Meyers was not amused.
“Your own network confirmed it! Do you guys watch your own channel, or do you just take naps until Trump tweets something?” Meyers asked.
“There’s no better indication of the fact that Fox is a propaganda machine and not a real news organization than the fact that they’re willing to undercut their own reporting to serve the president’s agenda. No legitimate news organization would do that. When the New York Times reports something negative about Joe Biden, they don’t use the headline, ‘Failing New York Times Spreads Fake News — Sad!’”
And that’s when Meyers delivered one more zinger to wrap up Tuesday’s “A Closer Look.”
“Just goes to show you they can’t actually campaign on their records, so instead they’re trying to concoct an alternate universe where coronavirus is over, the economy is back, and a president who brags about arms sales is anti-war. If that doesn’t work Trump will probably just try to convince people that he’s Joe Biden,” Meyers said, as he slipped into his Trump impersonation.
“‘You know, it’s just saying to my wife, Jill, no more malarkey! We hate malarkey, don’t we folks? We’ve had it up here with the malarkey.’”
You can watch all of the “A Closer Look” segment from Tuesday’s episode of “Late Night With Seth Meyers” in the video embedded up at the top of this article, or on YouTube here.