Friday, March 29

Jimmy Kimmel on Trump’s plan to take over the voting machines: ‘A Sieg Hail Mary, if you will’ | Summary of late night television


Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel kicked off the week with troubling evidence from the Trump White House in the days after the 2020 election. Over the weekend, politician obtained and published a draft executive order dated December 16, 2020 directing the secretary of defense to seize voting machines in battleground states.

The author of the draft order is unknown, though “Trump himself has been ruled out because there is no dipping sauce on any of the pages,” Kimmel joked.

The militarization of the elections “was a last effort to keep Trump in power,” he said. A Sieg Hail Mary, so to speak.

The draft order was part of a cache of documents turned over to the House investigative committee on Jan. 6, after the Supreme Court ruled that Trump could not shield himself from oversight on grounds of executive privilege.

In other news about the fallout from Jan. 6, Trump expressed fury that the House committee intends to interview his daughter Ivanka.

As he said in a statement: “They are using these things to try to distract people from the incompetence with which our country is run. And they don’t care. They will go after the children.

“He knows that Ivanka is 40 years old, right?” Kimmel laughed. “I mean, I know she missed a lot of birthdays, but… you can’t call them children and also put them in charge of peace in the Middle East. It’s one or the other.”

Stephen Colbert

On Late Night, Stephen Colbert reported on Russia’s move to build up troops on the Ukraine border, which has prompted Joe Biden to consider deploying thousands of troops to Eastern Europe and the Baltics. “That headline sounds too much like a game of Risk,” Colbert said. “We’re going to have some headlines that sound like we’re playing a nicer board game, like ‘Hippo Hunger Remains Insatiable’ or ‘New York City’s Biggest Landlord: This Thimble’.”

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The United States is not the only country making moves. Denmark has deployed F-16 jets to Lithuania, France has prepared to send troops to Romania, and Spain is sending four fighter jets to Bulgaria.

Why all the postures? On Saturday, the British government accused Moscow of plotting to install a pro-Russian government in the Ukraine. “Oh, Ukraine, you don’t want that,” Colbert said. “We just got rid of our pro-Russian leader, and it was a disaster.”

Colbert then referred to the draft executive order, which Trump tried to keep hidden from the public, outlining plans to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. “In attempting to nullify the election, the former president wanted! Let the military take over the voting machines!” Colbert exclaimed. “The only thing that would have stood between us and the authoritarian takeover would have been elderly poll workers.

“Is it getting to everyone here, that he was going to militarize the elections and seize the votes?” he added. The order would have turned the voting machines over to the defense department for a 60-day review, keeping Trump in power until at least mid-February 2021. “Man, he’ll do anything to screw up Black History Month,” Colbert pointed out.

seth meyers

And on Late Night, Seth Meyers criticized the draft executive order that exposes the Trump administration’s plan to nullify the election. “Sometimes I feel like we’re going to hear revelations like this for the rest of our lives,” Meyers said. “One day I’ll be sitting in a nursing home, looking out the window at my favorite tree, and a nurse will walk in and say, ‘Did you hear? Trump was training an army of rats to chew through voting machine wires.”

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The draft warrant cited two classified documents, suggesting that the author had access to information on sensitive government secrets. “Wow, so it could have been a high-level government executive, or a general, or literally anyone at Mar-a-Lago,” Meyers said.

“So whoever wrote this executive order was presumably someone who had access to government secrets, which is pretty crazy,” he continued. “This time, we just got lucky as Trump is too dumb to get away with it and a bunch of people stopped him threatening to resign. But what happens the next time a Republican politician wants to use the military to stay in power?

“I’d just like to point out,” he added, “to all the people who thought calling Trump’s plan a ‘coup attempt’ was hysterical, this latest executive order is just further proof that the threat was very real.”


www.theguardian.com

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