Seth Meyers on Trump's deployment of troops to LA: ‘About spectacle and power and nothing else'

The Guardian

21 hours ago

Late-night hosts blasted Donald Trump's deployment of troops to Los Angeles, his extremely partisan speech to the army and his upcoming military parade.
On Wednesday's Late Night, Seth Meyers mocked Donald Trump for saying he would arrest the California governor, Gavin Newsom, for the crime of 'running for governor, because he's done such a bad job.'
'If you could arrest someone for being bad at their job, the jails would be filled with former head coaches of the New York Jets,' Meyers joked.
'I gotta say, Trump's really lost his step. He can't even come up with a phony reason to arrest Newsom?' Meyers continued. 'I mean, I could come up with a reason to arrest Newsom if I had to. At the very least, I feel like the fashion police could slap the cuffs on him for riding a skateboard in a suit, you know? Come on dude, you look like the CEO of a tech startup that goes bust in six months.'
Meyers also looked ahead to the military parade in Washington DC this weekend. The parade, nominally held for Flag Day, just so happens to coincide with Trump's 79th birthday.
'There are two reasons this parade for the army is so important to Trump,' Meyers explained. 'One, tanks rolling down the street is exactly the kind of strongman theater he loves. And two, it's also his birthday.
'This is the perfect encapsulation of how Trump can be both terrifying and ridiculous at the same time,' he added. 'On the one hand, he's all 'we must project strength to let the opposition know they'll be crushed.' And on the other, he's like 'should we get two cakes?''
Meanwhile in Washington, the Senate grilled Trump's secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, over the deployment of 700 marines to quell protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Los Angeles. When asked to cite the provision of the constitution granting Trump the authority to send in the marines over the objection of Newsom and LA's mayor, Karen Bass, Hegseth demurred. 'It's like watching a spelling bee where the contestant has never heard the word he's being asked to spell or any other word or any letters,' Meyers laughed. 'He's making a face like the question was a combination of German and Japanese.'
Meyers already knew what Hegseth's justification was: 'This is all about spectacle and power and nothing else.'
On Wednesday, Trump spoke to the military at Fort Bragg and, according to Jimmy Kimmel, 'regaled them with a slew of insults about LA'.
As Trump put it: 'Within the span of a few decades, Los Angeles has gone from being one of the most beautiful, cleanest, safest cities on Earth to being a trash heap.'
Kimmel wasn't convinced. 'I moved to Los Angeles in 1994. I've been here more than 30 years – it was always a trash heap, OK? This has nothing to do with anything.
'And I find it especially rich coming from the guy who singlehandedly turned Atlantic City into a rusted-out, syringe-filled raccoon's nest,' he added.
'There's been so much misinformation, so much cherrypicking when it comes to what they show on TV – I mean, if you turn on Fox News, you'd think LA was getting invaded by more aliens than the movie Mars Attacks,' Kimmel continued. 'They're working so hard to make this seem like a lawless battleground.'
'We're OK! The only problem we have is this lunatic. He's acting like we're burning the city to the ground,' he added. Things in LA, he noted, were in fact peaceful, with some people protesting against Ice immigration sweeps in a small section of downtown, itself a small section of a very large city.
'This is the emergency equivalent of having a mosquito bite on your body,' Kimmel said. 'But this doesn't stop General Useless S Grant, who gave the young army men and women at Fort Bragg a wildly inappropriate and ridiculous speech.'
And on the Late Show, Stephen Colbert also disputed Trump's characterization of Los Angeles as a city in crisis. 'You can't characterize a whole city based on something that's just happening in a few blocks! All of New York is not Broadway.'
The mayor of LA, Karen Bass, said the 4,000 national guard troops Trump sent to the city have nothing to do and, instead of 'helping' with the protests, they are accompanying Ice on their raids. Colbert referred to a photo posted by Hegseth which showed three armed national guard members protecting two armed Ice agents arresting an unarmed man. 'And I'm being told Hegseth will soon send in four marines to cover the three national guard members to protect the two Ice agents who will arrest an old woman who swallowed a fly,' Colbert joked.
Bass is not the only California official vocally criticizing the administration. In a televised address, Newsom warned that 'the rule of law has increasingly been giving way to the rule of Don.'
'Oh, you blew it at the end!' Colbert joked. 'You were so close, but you violated the first rule of fighting fascism: no puns.'