President Trump appeared at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ on July 24, but his address to those in attendance didn’t exactly go that well. In fact, Seth Meyers is pretty sure that Mitch McConnell would’ve gotten a better crowd response.
During his “A Closer Look” segment on Monday night, the NBC host largely roasted Trump’s performance, arguing that the man is “better for [comedy] than he is at it.” At one point, the president started touting his ballroom once again, and based on the shots of the crowd while he did, it landed with a thud.
“He’s icing his own crowd. Trump is the first cool-down comic in history,” Meyers marveled. “The crowd would have been more warmed up if they just rolled out Mitch McConnell. ‘Make some noise for your opening act, Mitch McConnell! He’s going to hold up today’s paper to prove he’s alive! All right, let’s roll him back out. Good to see you, Mitch.’”
As his speech went on, Trump even started roasting it himself, criticizing whoever wrote the jokes he was trying to pull off. According to the president, there was only one joke “I thought was good in this whole fricking stupid speech that they wrote.”
“I’m sorry, there was one joke you liked in your whole speech, and you still went an hour and five minutes?” Meyers asked. “‘How much time you want to do tonight, Donald?’ ‘Let me see. I got one good one, two maybes, and then the rest of it’s a pile of dogs–t, so like, 65 minutes?’”
“For all your talk about building ballrooms, can you not read one?” Meyers continued. “Look at these faces. Those people want to go home. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you might be the first person that made a speech that violated the Geneva Conventions. By the time it was over, the people in the crowd looked like Matt Damon at the end of ‘The Odyssey.’”
You can watch Seth Meyers’ full “A Closer Look” segment in the video above.
