Since late-night shows tape early in the evening, it’s been a common problem lately that they’ll miss out on some of the biggest stories each day. That’s just how it is when your model is making fun of the Trump administration, which reboots the news cycle every few hours.
The issue today was the exit of Trump’s national security adviser H.R. McMaster and the news that he would be replaced by John Bolton. Given how insanely unpopular Bolton is because of his role in orchestrating the Iraq War during the mid-2000s, his selection to replace McMaster sparked jokes from late-night hosts.
Unfortunately, you probably will only get this one from Seth Meyers, since the news broke during the taping of “Late Night” on Thursday, too late for them to cram in some jokes — and there won’t be any new episodes until April 2. Even so, Meyers did manage to sneak in a brief mention just before introducing the first guest of the night, Taraji P. Henson, along with an accompanying joke about Trump’s America is far too chaotic for him to likely still feel the need to address it once he’s back on the air in ten days.
“You know, guys, we try to stay as up to date as we can on this show when we do our monologue and we do our ‘A Closer Look.’ We love to give you news that happened today. Sometimes though, I walk off during a commercial break, like I just did, and find out that H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, he just resigned. He’s out. John Bolton is in. And we have a hiatus next week so you’re never going the hear me talk about it because in a week nobody’s gonna f—ing care about that. So I wanted to mention it now.”
I would note, of course, that Meyers almost certainly will have some things to say about Bolton at some point, just maybe not jokes about the hilariously high levels of turnover in the White House and how Bolton will probably only last a couple months. Hopefully, when Meyers takes aim at Bolton it won’t be because he convinced Trump to nuke North Korea or invade Iran.