Jon Stewart on Trump’s inauguration: ‘A cycle of no accountability’
Late-night hosts react to Donald Trump’s billionaire-studded inauguration for a second term as president.
Jon Stewart
Back at his Monday evening perch on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart wasted no time tearing into Trump’s inauguration, attended by such tech billionaire CEOs or founders as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and more.
Basically, “a plethora of bald billionaires who all seem to go to the same bio-hack life extension clinic and say, ‘Give me the Lex Luthor’,” Stewart joked. “The six guys who control maybe 20% of the world’s wealth and 100% of your nudes.”
“Shouldn’t this gathering be happening in a volcano’s lair near Zurich? Or are we just open source Illuminati?” he added. “Honestly, there is not a useful app of communication not controlled by at least one of these individuals. And you may not be concerned that they’ve all ponied up a million dollars to be sitting there and are kissing the ass of a president who openly threatens non-ass-kissers. But trust me, shit’s gonna get weird.”
Related: Stephen Colbert on Trump’s tech bro buddies: ‘the guys that Biden warned us about’
And within hours, things did get weird, with Musk appearing to give a fascist-style salute at the inauguration. “Charitably, I’m going to say that was just an awkward ‘my heart goes out to you’ gesture,” said Stewart, before a clip of Musk doing it a second time. “Son of a bitch, you really want to make sure the people in the back see it, I guess. I’m just going to be generous and say, maybe that was Elon’s attempt at … dabbing on the haters?”
Trump’s rambling speech, meanwhile, “followed the American tradition of a passive-aggressive transfer of power – the incoming president gets to completely shit on the outgoing president, in front of that president and hopefully his spouse”.
Little comic moments aside, “the takeaway of this entire day was a man who tried to overthrow the government has been peacefully handed the reins of power, and the outgoing president has started a new tradition of blanket pardoning everyone in his orbit,” Stewart concluded, referring to Joe Biden’s last-minute pardons of his family and associates. “The two men created a magnificent snake sucking its own dick, a cycle of no accountability.”
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers laughed at the fact that Trump supporters got shut out of the inauguration owing to the cold, while billionaires such as Musk got prime seating indoors. “God, so ironic. When Trump was leaving office, they walked right into the Capitol,” Meyers joked. “Now he’s back, and they’re shit out of luck.
“That’s right, Maga supporters are left out in the cold while Trump gave toasty indoor VIP seats to the wealthy tech oligarchs,” he continued. “Which brings us to a segment called, ‘Do I Really Have to Explain the Metaphor Here?’”
Meyers also got into the substance of Trump’s speech: “an unsettling, low-energy mix of ominous fascism and weird shit that no one but Trump and his minions even care about” such as “drill, baby, drill”, the “external revenue service” to force tariffs of foreign countries, and his pitch to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
“In one speech, he managed to lay out a chilling vision of an authoritarian regime that will invoke an 18th-century law to conduct mass deportations, accelerate climate change and criminalize trans people,” said Meyers. “The visuals, more than the words, made it clear what his priorities will be: he’s going to put the interests of wealthy oligarchs before Americans.”
Stephen Colbert
“It happened. Donald Trump is president again,” said a chagrined Stephen Colbert on the Late Show.
The host invoked the famous axioms by former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld: known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, or things you don’t know that you don’t know. “But he never completed the quartet of the possible combinations,” said Colbert. “The final and, in my opinion, the most dangerous one is there are unknown knowns – things that we know but we choose to un-know for some reason.
“Well, for some reason, and it may be a perfectly understandable reason, the American people have decided to un-know what they definitely knew about Donald Trump,” he continued. “Today, the great remembering began.”
“Today represents, I believe, a turning point, a turning page for all Americans,” he later added. “Whether you supported Trump or not, no matter how much we think we know what’s going to happen over the next four years, we don’t know. We all have to look at the president with fresh eyes and let go of all the things that he did during his first term and look to the future … fuck it! He told us to inject bleach and I still believe there’s a pee pee tape! Russia, if you’re listening, let the ‘golden age’ begin.”
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel mourned “a day that was unimaginable four years ago, and it’s still pretty hard to wrap your head around”.
Before the ceremony, Trump launched a personal branded meme cryptocurrency. “I hope we all understand how crazy that is,” Kimmel noted, “the president of the United States – following in the footsteps of the ‘hawk tuah’ girl.”
It was below freezing in Washington “which is the only reason that Bible didn’t burst into flames when Trump was sworn in”, Kimmel joked. Festivities had to be moved indoors, “which was actually better for Trump. Harder for Melania to escape.”
Related: Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Trump is already reminding us of what a terrible mistake we made’
As for Trump’s second inaugural address, Kimmel noted that it was “more ominous than I anticipated”.
“Emperor Palpateeny hands is back,” he said. “It was not an uplifting or even well-written speech.”
As for the billionaire, “a lot of people were wondering why all these rich guys were invited to sit in the Capitol for the inauguration – there’s a perfectly good explanation for it. Trump is selling the country to the highest bidder,” Kimmel said. “It really has been amazing to watch these powerful men, who don’t need to ever make another dollar in their lives, debasing themselves to suck up to this ridiculous person.”
