Jon Stewart on Democrats protecting healthcare in shutdown: ...

Late-night hosts examine each party’s role in the ongoing government shutdown and Donald Trump’s deployment of the national guard for nonexistent emergencies.

Jon Stewart

Returning to his Monday night slot on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart looked into the ongoing government shutdown. For a week now, Republicans and Democrats have been gridlocked over a congressional budget bill, which requires 60 votes for passage.

With the tiniest bit of leverage, “Democrats have come forth with a laundry list of demands to force,” said Stewart. “I’m just kidding. They want like two things.” That would be the reversal of Medicaid cuts and the extension of Obamacare subsidies, which would prevent health insurance premiums from spiking for millions of Americans. Republicans have claimed, baselessly, that such allowances would force taxpayers to pay for healthcare for “millions of illegal aliens”, to quoteMarkwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma senator.

Stewart examined the Democratic response, starting with Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, who assured in a press conference that “Democrats are adamant that we must protect the healthcare of the American people.”

Stewart interrupted: “If you had stopped there, that would be great, but you’re gonna keep talking aren’t you?”

Schumer continued, joking with Amy Klobuchar, a fellow Democratic senator: “New data came out today from KFF, and that is not Kentucky Fried French Fries. KFF … That’d be Kentucky French Fries, hmmm?”

“Who is that joke even for?” Stewart fumed. “Six-year-olds who watch C-Span? What the fuck are you doing?!”

“Chuck Schumer is a human flat tire,” he continued. “You just can’t ‘Kentucky Fried French Fry,’” Stewart joked, impersonating Schumer’s voice. “Look at Klobuchar! Poor Klobuchar. That is the face of someone who talked to their dad, who said, ‘Just please don’t do your Indian accent in the restaurant. That’s all I’m asking.’”

But Stewart still compared it favorably with the Republicans, who continue to claim that they are the party of healthcare access and that the shutdown is not their fault. Stewart showed a clip of the House speaker Mike Johnson, who argued that “the president takes no pleasure in this”.

Stewart called BS: “The president takes no pleasure in this? The president takes only pleasure,” he said. “Given the president’s vascular condition, this might be the only thing keeping him hard.”

“His only reason for getting up in the morning is vengeance,” he continued. “Trump has been steamrolling over the Democrats and the law so consistently since day one of the presidency, the nation’s pundits and legal experts are running out of ways to describe it.”

“Apparently, Republicans won’t be satisfied with 99.8% domination. They must have it all. Ice went from deporting ‘the worst of the worst’ to throwing grandmothers onto linoleum and zip-tying American children, and everyone’s just supposed to be cool with the new masked, incredibly well-funded paramilitary group. And Democrats are just reduced to petty gestures of restroom resistance,” he added before a clip of someone refusing Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, entrance to a restroom in Illinois.

“Look, I’ve given Democrats an enormous amount of shit for their poor leadership, lack of specific and actionable plans, terrible messaging, abysmal wordplay – did I mention poor leadership? But standing up for 75 million Americans in this moment, to defend the rights of people to go into a little less medical debt, seems like the least they can fucking do,” he concluded.

“And perhaps, maybe, that will remind the Republicans that their mandate wasn’t 100%. They’ve just caught a constitutional, administrative and logistics break.”

Seth Meyers

On Late Night with Seth Meyers, Meyers also analyzed the government shutdown, which Trump alternately claimed he loved, because it gave the government an opportunity to lay off “Democrat Agencies, many of which are a political SCAM” (there are no such agencies), and hated, for what Trump called the “democrat layoffs”.

“This is the world we’re living in: the same guy who says he loves the shutdowns because it lets him fire Democrats also says that the shutdown is the Democrats’ fault because he has to fire people,” said Meyers.

“I thought you guys said you were going to fire ‘all the leftwing bureaucrats at Democrat agencies.’ Now you’re blaming Democrats for those layoffs?” he said, mocking Trump: “‘It’s such a shame, we wanted to keep all the woke Marxist bureaucrats at the Department of Critical Race Theory, but unfortunately, Chuck Schumer made me fire them all.’”

Meyers also touched on Trump’s attempts to send the California national guard to Portland, Oregon, which he claimed, again without merit, is “burning to the ground” based on what he had seen on TV.

“What television are you watching? Did Trump sit on the remote and accidentally turn on the Yule Log?” Meyers wondered. “Portland and Chicago are not war zones. They’re normal American cities going about normal life, and the protests are well within the control of local officials.”

A Trump-appointed federal judge in Oregon blocked the deployment – for now. Meyers said: “This is a perfect microcosm of Trump: claiming he’s all-powerful to crack down on dissent while also insisting it’s not his fault if the government can’t function.”

Jimmy Kimmel

And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel cheered a new YouGov poll that found the host to be more popular than Trump, by 16 points. “It’s nice,” he said, “but it feels like – considering the fact that I’m not a convicted felon friend of Jeffrey Epstein, and I’ve never paid off a porn star, sent a team of masked goons into a park to pull an old lady away from her grandchildren, I feel like my rating should be higher?”

“At this point, finding a toenail in your salad has a seven-point lead over Donald Trump,” he quipped.

“If he’s looking to improve his approval numbers, I have an idea: release the Epstein files,” Kimmel continued, noting another poll found that 77% of Americans want the full Epstein files released.

“Trump’s treating these Epstein files like a grumpy old neighbor on Halloween – he turns off all the lights and just hopes the trick-or-treaters will assume there’s nobody home,” Kimmel joked.

The host also touched on a new treasury proposal to mint $1 coins with Trump’s face on it. The back of the proposed coin showed Trump with his fist in the air alongside the motto “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

“Only Donald Trump would shut down the government and say ‘Hey, you know what? Let’s mint some money with my big fat head on it,’” said Kimmel.

Still, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, maintained that she was unaware if Trump was aware of the treasury’s proposal. “Oh I’m sure he has no idea about this idea that was definitely his idea,” Kimmel joked. “If this happens, this coin would be a symbol of Trump’s dominance over all branches of government – and also a major choking hazard for Eric.”