One day after President Donald Trump shared a racist ad about the caravan of Central American refugees headed to the U.S. border, late-night hosts slammed his foreboding rhetoric about the migrants on Thursday night.
Trump has endeavored to make the caravan a hot-button issue in an effort to gin up support for the GOP before the Nov. 6 vote. The ad he shared Wednesday drew comparisons between the caravan and one immigrant who was convicted of murdering two policemen, deported once and returned during the George W. Bush administration (the ad nevertheless stated, “Democrats let him into our country. Democrats let him stay.”)
On The Late Show on Thursday, Colbert tackled Trump’s official announcement of an order that he claimed would prohibit migrants crossing the border illegally from seeking asylum and lead to their imprisonment. Colbert started out by picking apart Trump’s statement during the speech that “America is a welcoming country, and under my leadership it is a welcoming country.”
“Good plan, Mr. President, warm up the crowd with a joke,” Colbert said.
At another point, he attacked Trump’s suggestion that immigrants asking for asylum were reading a memorized statement. “My god, could you imagine someone telling a federal official a phrase they couldn’t believe in?” Colbert asked. He then played a clip of Trump pledging to “preserve, protect and defend” during his presidential inauguration.
Seth Meyers devoted his “Closer Look” segment to what he called Trump’s “scaremongering” about the caravan. Of Trump’s claims that the caravan is pushing women and children but it’s “largely, a big percentage of young men: young, strong,” Meyers shot back, “He sounds like Long Island divorcee trying to convince her friends to go out to a club. There’ll be lots of men: young, strong, they love to travel.”
Meyers then took on Fox News guests who were parroting the president’s rhetoric about the threat that the caravan posed. “They’re coming in with diseases such as smallpox and leprosy and TB that are going to infect our people in the United States,” former ICE agent David Ward told Fox News.
“Smallpox and leprosy?” Meyers asked. “Where is this caravan coming from, medieval England?”
Over on ABC, Jimmy Kimmel homed in on Trump’s recent interview with Good Morning America‘s Jonathan Karl. When Karl asked why Trump was sending 10,000 or 15,000 active-duty troops to the border, Trump responded, in part, “you have caravans coming up that look a lot larger than reported, let me tell you, I’m pretty good at estimating crowd size.”
“Now he’s just screwing with us, right?” Kimmel asked. “He is the only person in the world that I know for sure is not good at estimating crowd size.”
(Excerpt) Read more in: The Hollywood Reporter