Seth Meyers
Late-night hosts recapped the latest Republican primary debate, held in Miami on Wednesday night without the faraway frontrunner, Donald Trump. The former president “is so dominant, even his own former vice-president, who in a normal world might be a top contender, just dropped out last month and nobody noticed or cared”, said Seth Meyers on Late Night.
“Although, I’m not sure anyone has ever really noticed Mike Pence,” he added. “He’s the color they paint your apartment before you move in. That’s how he got away from the mob trying to kill him on January 6 – he just stood on a pedestal in the Rotunda, and they just thought he was a statue.”
The rest of the candidates – Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Chris Christie, Tim Scott and Ron DeSantis – are polling so far behind Trump that “there’s really no point in continuing to hold JV debates with all the eventual losers”, said Meyers. “The only real benefit to these debates is wherever desperate losers gather, there are occasionally some fireworks.”
Such as when Ramaswamy brought up Haley’s daughter’s use of TikTok, prompting Haley to call him “scum”.
“‘Scum’ is not a word you tend to hear in lofty political debate. I don’t recall ever hearing Lincoln call Douglas a mouthy son of a bitch,” Meyers joked.
“But let’s face it, this is just what the modern GOP is: people attacking other people’s children in the hope of winning an election they’ve already lost.”
Meyers also mocked DeSantis’s “complete inability to smile like a normal human being”. On several occasions, DeSantis seemed to be forcing himself to smile. “If you’re trying to convince people that you don’t wear lifts inside your boots, maybe don’t make the ‘my heels are killing me’ face,” Meyers said.
Of the debate as a whole, he added: “This whole thing was a demented circus.”
Jimmy Kimmel
Vivek Ramaswamy is a “weird, unlikable cartoon character of a person, and not too swift either”, said Jimmy Kimmel, replaying the clip of Ramaswamy taking a shot at one of Nikki Haley’s kids, to which Haley replied: “Leave my daughter out of your voice.”
“It sounds like the first draft of what Will Smith yelled at Chris Rock,” Kimmel quipped.
Kimmel also mocked DeSantis’s efforts to appear cheerful. “You know, Ron has been told he needs to smile more,” he said. “He always has a look of intense constipation on his face at all times, so he’s trying very hard now to come across as human.”
Trump, meanwhile, skipped the debate to campaign, telling the crowd that his many legal woes – he currently has five separate trials – are evidence of their persecution. “I’m being indicted for you,” he said.
“Committed the crimes for himself, but he was indicted for us, he was indicted for our sins,” Kimmel deadpanned. “And of course, no Trump rally would be complete without a little fudging of the crowd size.” Trump claimed he spoke to tens of thousands of people, but the venue, which had many empty seats, had a capacity of 5,200.
“He’s back to exaggerating crowd size,” Kimmel laughed. “At this point, the only way for Donald Trump to draw a crowd of 10,000 is with a Sharpie. There were so many empty seats, you couldn’t tell if it was a Trump rally or a Trump inauguration.”
