President Donald Trump participated in ABC's televised town hall on Tuesday, purportedly to answer questions from undecided voters (a demographic that somehow hasn't been made extinct in this accursed election year). Trump gotta Trump though, with Late Night host Seth Meyers blasting the president for "repeat[ing] the same deranged lies we've heard a million times."
"Honestly, I'm not sure I see the value in hosting an event like this," said Meyers in Wednesday night's Closer Look segment, utterly unsurprised by how the event played out. "Really the best you can hope for with a town hall like this is a new lie for reporters to debunk: 'You know, they say coronavirus can be cured by swallowing a golf ball covered in Emergin-C while shining a laser pointer up your butt.'"
Notably, Trump claimed at the town hall that he didn't downplay the coronavirus — a stark contrast to his taped, on-the-record admission that this was exactly what he tried to do. The president had also made very public, widely publicised statements dismissing COVID-19 as "like the regular flu."
Trump's actions haven't supported his new narrative that he "up-played" the coronavirus either. His administration has repeatedly come under fire for its notoriously slow pandemic response, with the virus having now killed over 193,000 people in the U.S.
"Trump lies so much he's turned fact checkers into auctioneers," quipped Meyers, playing a clip of CNN fact checker Daniel Dale reeling off a non-exhaustive list of false claims the president made on the night. "In order to fact check a Trump Town Hall reporters have to talk like they're describing the side effects at the end of a drug commercial."
