In a new “A Closer Look” segment from the attic in his home, Seth Meyers delivered another screed about Donald Trump’s fumbling of the coronavirus pandemic in Thursday’s episode of “Late Night.” But he spent the last third of of the segment bemoaning Bernie Sanders’ exit from the presidential race, which the senator announced on Wednesday morning.
Meyers focused generally on Trump’s attempts to eschew responsibility for the spread of the virus in the U.S., as well as his new efforts to try to get Americans to forget how it all went down. He said Trump’s stance comes from the hope that we’re all akin to Drew Barrymore’s character in the romantic comedy “Fifty First Dates” — she had no long-term memory, and thus every date she went on with Adam Sandler’s character was like a first date for her.
“But that’s not how most of our brains work. We remember the things you said and then we hold you to account for them,” Meyers said. “And now it looks like our chance to do that will be in November in a race between Trump and Joe Biden, after Bernie Sanders officially dropped out of the presidential race yesterday.
“Which sucks for a ton of reasons, one of which is the timing on Medicare for all. Would have been pretty f—ing great right now given that we’re going through a massive health care emergency and millions of people are also losing their health insurance.”
Then Meyers went in on the American healthcare system as it exists today.
“Maybe we’re finally all learning now that tying your health care to your job was a stupid idea,” he said. “I mean, what do they have to do with each other anyway? If we really wanted to make healthcare commensurate with your job then nurses, delivery workers and grocery clerks we get free gold plated health care for the rest of their lives and racist game show hosts would have to pay a million bucks to replace every tooth that falls out.
“You have to admit Bernie fundamentally changed politics and he did it in the course of like five years. Let’s just remember how extraordinary this was.”
Then Meyers spent a couple minutes looking back on Bernie’s rise, starting with his 2015 announcement that he was running for president as a Democrat — a humble affair that took place in a small park near the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. And concluded with a clip from last month in which Bernie sarcastically mocked Republicans who were upset about some of the provisions for unemployment benefits in the recently passed coronavirus stimulus package.
Then Meyers concluded Thursday’s “A Closer Look” with a comment about how, well, Bernie’s platform is exactly what America needs right now.
“We need those kinds of major changes to deal with the broken government that Trump is currently exposing,” Meyers said. “He ignored years of warnings about a possible pandemic, lied about it when it arrived, forfeited responsibility to the states, pushed an unproven miracle cure and is now asking us to just forget the whole thing. And if you beg him to provide leadership, he responds by saying–”
And then the “Late Night” segment ended with a clip of Trump saying, “I don’t think I’m gonna be doing it.”
You can watch the entire “A Closer Look” segment from Thursday’s episode of “Late Night with Seth Meyers” in the video embedded at the top of this article.