Late-night hosts reacted to the congressional vote sending the bill to release all files related to late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to the desk of his former friend Donald Trump.
Seth Meyers
It was a tough Tuesday for Trump, who lost his months-long battle to stop the release of the Epstein files on Tuesday after Congress passed a bill forcing the justice department publish them. “So now Trump is doing a 180,” said Seth Meyers on Wednesday’s Late Night.
“He says he’ll sign the bill that forces him to release the files he could’ve released on his own but wouldn’t, thus requiring a bill to force him to do the thing he didn’t want to do that he’ll now be forced to do because of the bill he was against that he will now sign.”
“It’s obvious why Trump fought so hard to stop this bill from passing,” Meyers later added. “He called Republicans who supported it stupid, called the files a hoax made up by Democrats, his team held an emergency meeting in the White House situation room to sway Republicans to vote against it, and he called Marjorie Taylor Greene a traitor.”
Greene, a far-right Republican and former ally of the president, got the last word on Tuesday. Speaking outside Congress, she said: “I was called a traitor by a man that I fought five, no actually six years for … Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is an American who serves foreign countries and themselves.”
“In fairness, she didn’t say Trump’s name. She could’ve been talking about anybody,” said Meyers. “Maybe she was referring to a different president who does deals with foreign governments and has a secret Chinese bank account and got a crown from South Korea and a plane from Qatar and a gold bar from Switzerland.”
And also the guy who meets with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, at the White House, in a chummy photo op where Trump dismissed questions about MBS’s involvement in the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“Trump’s whole vibe in this meeting is a reminder not to trust him when he tells you he cut ties with Epstein after learning the truth about him. That’s Mohammed bin Salman,” Meyers added, mocking the president – “you call him MBS, I call him Bone Saw!”
Jimmy Kimmel
“We are now one step closer to answering the question: what did the president know and how old were these women when he knew it?” said Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday, after Congress voted overwhelmingly, 427-1, to authorize the release of the Epstein files.
“It was such a landslide that Trump might actually be able to rebury the Epstein files under it,” Kimmel quipped.
“Usually when Trump gets a bill, he declares bankruptcy and doesn’t pay it,” he continued. “But this one, he’s going to have to sign it. Or at least he says he’s going to sign it, which means there’s about maybe a 12% chance he will.”
“Trump hasn’t been this nervous about signing something since Don Jr’s birth certificate,” he joked. Hours after Kimmel’s taping, Trump signed the bill into law.
Kimmel also mocked the House speaker, Mike Johnson, who fled the scene while telling reporters he was “deeply disappointed” in the vote and had “concerns” about the bill without redactions to supposedly “protect the innocent”.
“They are so scared of Trump,” Kimmel mused. “What is going on? Is he beating them? I don’t get it. They just blindly defend him. They don’t know what’s in those files! They’re taking his word for it. They’re taking the word of someone who paid a porn star $130,000 and claims he didn’t do anything with her.”
Even if Trump does sign the bill, it’s still unclear whether the justice department will actually release all the files, or have some files tied up in investigations – “specifically, investigations Trump orders to keep them tied up in investigations,” Kimmel noted. “And that is where things will get interesting. Will we have the original documents? Or is Trump going to pull a Taylor Swift and give us The Epstein Files (Donnie’s Version)? We might not ever know.”
Stephen Colbert
And on The Late Show,
Stephen Colbert also celebrated the congressional vote, which “then left the bill on Trump’s desk like a flaming bag of poop. Very hard to put gold leaf on that.”
“What’s he going to do?” he wondered. “Now remember, Trump already tried to do everything possible to keep this from ever happening.” As president, Colbert reminded, Trump could have released the files at any moment; he did not, and never explained why. “And when the discharge petition to release the files started, he sent his minions to warn all the Republicans that voting to release the files would be seen as a ‘hostile act’,” even dragging far-right congresswoman Lauren Boebert into the situation room to pressure her to drop her support for the measure.
“And when all of that failed, and it looked like he was going to lose, Trump suddenly flipped, and said that everybody should for it,” he explained. “And they did. Hence, the poop flambé.”
One question remained for Colbert, who taped before Trump signed the bill: “Is he going to sign it? Is he going to not sign it and change his name to Signor Ramon and flee to Acapulco?”
The new law requires the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, to make all unclassified documents related to Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell publicly available within 30 days, or before 19 December – “Just in time for my pervert advent calendar,” Colbert joked. “What do we got today? Oh, this chocolate looks like Jared from Subway.”
