Trevor Noah on Trump's 'perfect replacement' for RBG: 'Grade-A trolling'
Trevor Noah
âIf anyone needed a reminder about whatâs at stake in an election, well last night, you got it,â said Trevor Noah on the Daily Show. âRepublicans took full advantage of their hold on the White House and the Senateâ on Monday night to confirm conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court seat vacated by the late liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died of cancer at 87 in September.
The GOP pushes Barrettâs SCOTUS confirmation through in a basic cable version of Eyes Wide Shut, and the Democrats threaten ârevenge.â pic.twitter.com/bRIyTpjBU6
â The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) October 28, 2020
Despite Republicansâ precedent to hold on nominating a new justice until after an election â one set in 2016 to block Obamaâs nomination of Merrick Garland â Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, turbocharged the nomination process; Barrett went from potential candidate to supreme court justice in a month. âSay what you want about the GOP, man, but this shit? This was gangster,â said Noah of the accelerated timeline.
Catching up on a normally months-long process railroaded as early voting in the election was already under way was like âwatching a chop shop strip down your car for partsâ, Noah joked. âLike, yo, Iâll miss my Audi, but you gotta admire their technique.â
Still, âI was shocked to see the Senate move this quick,â Noah added. âI mean, normally they take months to do anything, but here they moved so fast it was disorienting. It was like when you call Customer Service and immediately speak to a human being.â
Related: Seth Meyers: 'The Trump White House has given up' on the pandemic
To celebrate Barrettâs confirmation, Trump held a night-time swearing-in ceremony at the Rose Garden â site of the nomination party for Barrett that doubled as a White House coronavirus super-spreader event â in which he praised the new justice as the âperfect replacementâ for Ginsburg.
That comment demonstrated âgrade-A trollingâ, said Noah. â[Trump] knows what heâs doing. Because yes, RBG and Barrett are both women, but Barrett is going to dismantle all of RBGâs good work. So this would be like if the Lakers replaced LeBron with Ben Carson. Technically, yes, theyâre swapping one black man for another, but good luck on making the playoffs next season.â
Stephen Colbert
Though Barrettâs confirmation to the supreme court was, given the Republican Senate majority, inevitable news, ânot everything about Barrettâs confirmation had to happen the way it happenedâ, said Stephen Colbert on the Late Show. For instance, Barrettâs âhastily thrown together swearing-in ceremonyâ at the White House and âbaldly political photo op with President Trumpâ broke the courtâs norms of political impartiality. The partisan pomp was ânot normalâ, Colbert explained, especially as Barrettâs confirmation could allow Republicans to limit mail-in voting in the election.
âBut on the bright side, theyâre already doing that,â Colbert deadpanned. On Monday, the supreme court rejected, along ideological lines, a request by Wisconsin to extend its deadline for counting mail-in ballots â a decision which could disenfranchise up to 100,000 voters. âOr, as the conservative justices called it, a good start,â Colbert said.
Related: Amy Coney Barrett is sworn in as supreme court justice - as it happened
Colbert called the decision to limit mail-in voting during a pandemic a âdumb rulingâ, but âthe dumbest partâ was written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The conservative justice, appointed by Trump in 2018, cited the 2000 supreme court decision in Bush v Gore as reason to dismiss mail-in ballots accepted or delivered after election day in 2020, despite the 2000 decision explicitly stating it âcould not function as a precedentâ.
âWell, I guess itâs too much to expect Brett Kavanaugh to listen to someone saying âstop, donât do thisâ,â Colbert joked. Kavanaugh argued late-arriving ballots could âflipâ an election and thus would arouse âsuspicions of improprietyâ; in a blunt dissent, Justice Elena Kagan reminded that âthere are no results to âflipâ until all valid votes are counted.â
âExactly! If we donât count all the votes, weâre not declaring a winner, weâre just saying whoâs ahead at midnight,â Colbert said. âThereâs a reason you never hear a baseball announcer say: âItâs the bottom of the eighth, bases loaded, all tied up, Tampa Bay 3, Los Angeles 3, itâs a hit and a long fly ball and letâs call it there, folks. Weâre willing to project the Dodgers gave me my job so they win.ââ
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel checked in on the Trump campaignâs jam-packed schedule of in-person events, despite soaring coronavirus case numbers. âEven though the pandemic appears to be getting worse, even though the virus is on the rise in almost every state and all over the world, fear not! Because the president says weâre rounding the corner,â Kimmel remarked.
Trump has trailed Biden in national polls, and with just a week to go, the presidentâs âstrategy now, even more than ever, is to just make things upâ, Kimmel said. Kimmel played a Trump campaign ad in which the president rambled through fragments about the âradical leftâ, âsocialist stateâ, how Democrats will âtake away your fracking and energyâ, and his latest slogan: âNo oil, no guns, no God.â
âFinally,â joked Kimmel, âthe long-awaited sequel to Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV.â