Late night hosts are hammering Trump's racism after his weekend of attacks
"Another weekend, another racist outburst from our racist president."
Late night hosts had plenty to work with on Monday night, with Donald Trump's public appearances over the last weekend of July providing a wealth of wildly inappropriate, offensive, and delusional tweets and soundbites.
There was the threat to impose tariffs on French wine in retaliation for the European nation's new taxes on big tech companies — and the stated preference, from the famous teetotaler, for American wines over French because of how they look.
There was the thing where he blamed Obama for the White House aircon being too cold.
There was the bit where he claimed to have been "down there" with first responders on Sept. 11, 2001, while signing the hard-fought bill guaranteeing them funding.
And there were jokes aplenty about the POTUS' ongoing slurred speech problems, as he referred to "law-markers" and "9-electerm... 11 victims."
But almost every single late night host straight-up called Trump a racist on Monday.
Trump had spent the weekend attacking Baltimore congressman Elijah Cummings, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, insisting that his district was "very dangerous and filthy" and "infested" with rats. Plenty of commentators have picked up that, from Rep. John Lewis to the Squad, Trump tends to invoke the word "infested" -- with crime, vermin, or disease -- when he wants to attack people of colour who criticise him.
On Late Night, Seth Meyers opened his 'A Closer Look' segment with the quote at the top of this story -- and kept going from there.
"He keeps coming back to this racist trope because he's a racist. It's the core of his ideology," said Meyers. "It's not like you need to play clips of him backwards like a Beatles record to hear some sort of secret message admitting he's a racist."
On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert continued his run of straight talk by introducing "episode three... million" of "Is Donald Trump a Racist?"
“Previously, on Is Donald Trump Racist?: Yes!”
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Trevor Noah also employed a regular segment with similar bluntness, bringing back the noir-themed 'Racism Detective' for a one-word solve: "Yes."
Jimmy Kimmel stopped short of explicitly calling Trump or his comments racist but he did introduce the Trump part of his monologue with a tongue-in-cheek "Speaking of rodents...", pausing for laughter, and referred back to Trump's attacks on "the Squad" last week.
"The man who tells us 'love it or leave it' has now attacked more cities than Godzilla," quipped Kimmel.
And even Jimmy Fallon -- who, let's not forget, gleefully ruffled Trump's hair on national TV during the 2016 campaign but often opts not to ruffle feathers with overtly political jokes -- had a dig at the president during a bit about Shark Week, saying Trump loves it "because it’s the only time he can tweet 'I love great whites' without being called a racist."
When many venerable news institutions are still struggling to call racism what it is when they see it, resorting instead to meaningless euphemisms like "racially tinged," it's heartening in a bleak sort of way to see populist light entertainment peppered with unequivocal condemnation of it.
Should more people be calling Donald Trump a racist? Yes.
Caitlin is Mashable's Australian Editor. She has written for The Guardian, Junkee, and any number of plucky little music and culture publications that were run on the smell of an oily rag and have since been flushed off the Internet like a dead goldfish by their new owners. She also worked at Choice, Australia's consumer advocacy non-profit and magazine, and as such has surprisingly strong opinions about whitegoods. She enjoys big dumb action movies, big clever action movies, cult Canadian comedies set in small towns, Carly Rae Jepsen, The Replacements, smoky mezcal, revenge bedtime procrastination, and being left the hell alone when she's reading.
