Tuesday had two major political items everyone had to care about: Trump firing his secretary of state and the special congressional election in Pennsylvania. With those election results still in limbo late into Tuesday night, that meant Rex Tillerson was the clear-cut topic of conversation for late-night hosts on Tuesday. Seth Meyers devoted a short segment on “Late Night” to discuss exactly that.
“Tillerson found out that he was fired from a Trump tweet. Even when you get fired from Domino’s, the manager takes you into that crappy little office and tells you to your face. Tweets are for finding out which band is in town or which airline was mean to Chrissy Teigen,” Meyers joked, before exploring how much of a wuss Trump was to fire Tillerson like that.
“And of course, Trump didn’t fire Tillerson to his face just like he didn’t fire James Comey to his face. Basically, if you’re over six feet tall, Trump wants no part of giving you bad news. That’s why he’s jumping at the chance to meet with Kim Jong Un. ‘He’s how short? Oh! I’ll look like a giant next to him.’”
Meyers was quick to qualify that just because Tillerson was treated badly by his weird boss, we shouldn’t view him as a martyr.
“I’m not saying Rex Tillerson was a great secretary of state. He had the energy of a 14-year-old bloodhound on his third mint julep. He always looked like he was walking through a fart cloud,” Meyers joked before offering Trump another suggestion for a cabinet member who is not great at their job.
“But if you’re going to fire cabinet secretaries for being bad at their jobs, let me refer you to Betsy DeVos’ appearance on ’60 Minutes.’ not only was she wildly uninformed, but ’60 Minutes’ is also her longest work day so far.”
Meyers also dove into the possible reason why Trump fired Tillerson now instead of earlier (or later).
“Side thing, why fire Tillerson today? Well, just yesterday Tillerson said the attempted poisoning of an ex-spy in London quote, ‘clearly came from Russia’ and that the incident will trigger a response. He just didn’t know the response would be ‘clean out your desk.’”
To see all of the “Couple Things” segment from Tuesday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” check out the video embedded at the top of this post.