One of the wildest weeks of all of the wild weeks of Donald Trump’s 15-and-a-half months as president — yes, it really has only been that long — continued on Wednesday and Thursday with Trump’s new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, telling anyone who would listen, including interview spots on Hannity and “Fox and Friends,” that Trump totally knew about Michael Cohen paying Stormy Daniels off after Trump spent the last couple months denying that. And in a new edition of “A Closer Look” on Thursday, Seth Meyers was exasperated by the whole thing.
“So now the president’s lawyer has admitted that the president lied when he said he had nothing to do with the Stormy Daniels hush payment. And yet, Trump supporters have been twisting themselves in knots to justify his lies,” Meyers said. “For example, right after that [‘Fox and Friends’] interview aired, Arizona Republican congressman Andy Biggs had this to say about Giuliani’s admission.”
“Late Night” then played a clip from Fox News in which Biggs made the following strange assertion: “I don’t think somebody with President Trump’s income level actually maybe writes all his checks, you know what I mean? It would not surprise me if, yes, he authorized the payment and, you know, it just gets kind of lost in the shuffle. I know that sounds crazy perhaps on a certain level.”
“No, it sounds crazy on every level,” Meyers said. “And it begs the question: if a $130,000 payment to a porn star can get lost in the shuffle, what else is in the shuffle? Seriously, how do you lose track of a hush payment to a porn star? Can you imagine Trump with a green visor trying to balance his checkbook?”
After trying to imagine just how that scenario might go (it involves Trump marking the hush payment as “fun stuff”), Meyers presented a theory on why it is that Trump surrogates keep doing this kind of thing on live TV.
“The question still stands: why did Giuliani do this? And here’s what I think is going on every time someone in Trump’s orbit gets a close up look at the Mueller investigation, they freak out. Remember Sam Nunberg or Carter Page? Once they saw how serious Mueller’s team was they went on TV and had meltdowns,” Meyers said. Nunberg famously spent nearly an entire day on CNN, smelling of alcohol according to CNN anchor Erin Burnett, trash talking everyone associated with Trump after being served with a subpoena by Mueller’s team.
“And the same thing is happening with Giuliani because it’s finally dawning on them that this investigation is not going away any time soon. Just last night another former trump aide, Michael Caputo, went on CNN after being interviewed by Mueller’s team and stressed repeatedly how tenacious the investigators were.”
Caputo said in the clip Meyers mentioned that “I think the Mueller team knew more about what I did in 2016 than I knew myself. And I think they know more about the Trump campaign than anyone that ever worked there.” Caputo also compared the whole thing to “a proctology appointment.”
That makes sense. Because Trump is definitely pulling his answers out of his a–,” Meyers said.
“So Trump’s own lawyer is now telling us that he lied about a hush payment to a porn star. Which raises the question: what else is he lying about? At this point, we should just assume the answer is everything.”
You can watch all of the “A Closer Look” segment from Thursday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” in the video embedded at the top of this post.