With Hurricane Florence bearing down on the East Coast, Seth Meyers spent his “A Closer Look” segment on “Late Night” Wednesday night trashing Donald Trump for how badly he will respond to the latest natural disaster.
“With a massive hurricane bearing down on millions of people, it’s as important as ever to have a competent government. And yet we have a president who is not only dangerously incompetent but proud of his incompetence,” Meyers said near the beginning of the segment, after making fun of Trump for his comment about how Hurricane Florence is “tremendously big and tremendously wet.”
“Yesterday, for example, he called his response to the hurricane in Puerto Rico an unsung success. And today, doubled down on that.”
Meyers was referring to a particularly rough Trump tweet on Wednesday where he said: “We got A Pluses for our recent hurricane work in Texas and Florida (And did an unappreciated great job in Puerto Rico even though an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally competent Mayor of San Juan). We are ready for the big one that is coming!”
“First of all, Puerto Rico is not an inaccessible island. They have a Ritz Carlton, and JetBlue has a flight there every half hour,” Meyers said. “You’re talking about it like it’s Skull Island. ‘It’s impossible to help them because their electric grid is constantly being torn up by Kong.’
“Second, it’s not reassuring when the president talks about a potentially devastating storm like he’s Fred Sanford.”
Meyers is referring to Red Foxx’s sitcom character on “Sanford and Sons” whose shtick was pretending to have a heart attack when things didn’t go his way. “Late Night” demonstrated the comparison with a clip from the show in which Sanford described the fake heart attack he was having like so: “Oh, it’s the worst one. This is the big one.”
“Seriously,” Meyers continued. “You’re calling a humanitarian disaster that left thousands of American citizens dead an ‘unappreciated success,’ while attacking the people who do something about it. Not only is our president a callous, incompetent moron, he’s also an ass. An ass that’s — ”
Meyers trailed off, with “Late Night” finishing his sentence with the clip of Trump calling the hurricane “tremendously big and tremendously wet.”
You can watch this and the rest of the “A Closer Look” segment from Wednesday’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers” in the video embedded at the top of this post.