“Late Night With Seth Meyers” returned from a two-week hiatus Monday night, and Meyers dedicated a 12-minute edition of “A Closer Look” to recapping all of the Trump-related news from the weekend, including his troubling meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
After running through the other legs of Trump’s Europe trip, including his inability to be normal around the Queen of England, Meyers addressed how Trump “twisted himself in knots to take Putin’s side” when he was asked early Monday morning about Russia’s attempts to meddle in American elections.
“Late Night” played the clip of Trump saying that he takes Putin’s word on the matter over that of the entire U.S. intelligence community: “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today. He just said, ‘It’s not Russia.’ I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
“Can someone get Trump a glass of water? ‘Cause he thirsty,” Meyers joked after the clip played. “It’s only a matter of weeks before he ‘Single White Female’s’ Putin. ‘Do you like my haircut, Vlad?’
“So just to recap, Trump blamed the U.S. for Russian aggression, attacked the FBI and the special counsel’s investigation, took Putin’s side on election meddling, attacked Democrats and Hillary Clinton with Putin standing next to him, and said Putin was strong and powerful. Can you imagine what their private meeting was like? I’m worried he let Putin annex one of the 50 states. ‘Here is an electoral map, pick one of the blue ones.’ Seriously, Trump gushes over Putin like a flustered 12-year-old who just met Mickey at Disneyland.”
Later, Meyers discussed one of the low-key weirdest parts of Trump’s press conference.
“And it got worse from there because Trump went on to peddle an insane conspiracy theory by implying something fishy was going on with the DNC server that was hacked by the Russians,” Meyers said, before “Late Night” played a montage of clips of Trump’s server-related comments:
“You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server?”
“Where is the server? I want to know where is the server, and what is the server saying?”
“But I really do want to see the server.”
“I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server.”
“Oh my god,” Meyers responded, exasperated. “He sounds like your uncle trying to get the waiter’s attention at a restaurant. ‘Where is the server? I want more bread, and I don’t have any ketchup for my crumpets.’ ”
Meyers eventually wrapped up the segment by bringing up the other big Russia-related news of the day: the arrest of Russian agent Mariia Butina.
“On top of everything else, today a Russian woman who tried to broker a pair of secret meetings between Trump and Putin was charged and accused of working with Americans to carry out a secret Russian effort to influence American politics,” Meyers said.
“So while that was happening, Trump was doing everything he could to ingratiate himself with Putin. He’s selling out our democracy.”
You can watch all of the “A Closer Look” segment from Monday’s episode of “Late Night With Seth Meyers” in the video embedded at the top of this post.