The long-lingering Donald Trump pee tape was the big news on Thursday, but as keeps happening all the revelations from former FBI Director James Comey’s memoirs broke late enough in the day that Seth Meyers couldn’t devote a whole “A Closer Look” to it. So while he did slip in a couple great zingers about how this feels like it proves that the pee tape really is real, Meyers spent most of the segment on House Speaker Paul Ryan, who announced on Wednesday he wouldn’t be run for re-election.
“No! You gave us Donald Trump. You should have to live with him,” Meyers exclaimed after playing the clip of Ryan making his announcement. “Come on, buddy. I mean, you can’t just clog up the toilet and then leave the dinner party. Stay here and get a plunger. Of course, for Paul Ryan, this is the logical conclusion of his term as speaker. After all, he spent the entirety of trump’s presidency ignoring the damage Trump has inflicted on our political system and pretending not to even read his tweets or stories about him.”
As Meyers worked his way through lampooning Ryan’s performance over the past couple years and beyond, he expressed a particular distaste for the corporate tax bill that Congress passed at the end of last year, which Ryan said he had “been working on in my entire adult life,” an idea Meyers found ridiculous.
“You worked on it your entire adult life? It literally had last-minute notes scribbled in the margins that no one could read. It’s like if I told my wife, ‘Honey, I painted a portrait of you for our anniversary and I’ve been working on it every day for the past 10 years,’” Meyers joked as this image came on screen:
“So Paul Ryan says he’s been working on this tax cut his entire adult life and yet when he tries to brag about the supposed benefits for average Americans, he bungles it. Like earlier this year, after Democrats said middle-class taxpayers would only get crumbs compared to what corporations and the wealthy would get, Ryan retweeted a story about Hostess, the snack company, giving its workers free snacks as a result of the tax cut. Ryan added, ‘These are crumbs.’ Dude, you’re bragging that because of the tax cut people will get free Twinkies?” Meyers said, before illustrating exactly how ridiculous that was using the names of various Hostess snakes to make his point about how not-helpful that tax bill was.
“They want healthcare and a livable wage, what’s wrong with you? Let me put this in Hostess terms: if you’re bragging about giving away Twinkies while the deficit Snowballs, you’re a Ding-Dong. And that is a zinger.”
Meyers concluded his Paul Ryan bashing sesh with this quip:
“Ryan wants to be remembered as a serious intellectual, but in reality, he’ll be remembered as an accomplice to Trump — which is dangerous because Trump is somehow becoming even more untethered if that’s possible.”
You can watch all of the “A Closer Look” from Thursday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” in the video embedded at the top of this post.