The GOP's Insane Election Conspiracy Theories Now Include "Italygate": A Closer Look

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Why no adult diapers jokes?

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/yaosaywhat 📅︎︎ Jun 08 2021 🗫︎ replies
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-Donald Trump reportedly believes he'll be reinstated in the White House, as some of his allies and supporters openly call for a coup and Republicans work to rig future elections. For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look." ♪♪ Well, many things have happened in the last week or so. A former national security advisor suggested a coup should happen in the U.S. A Democratic senator came out against a crucial election reform bill, for extremely dumb reasons. Rudy Giuliani did a MyPillow ad during a video on UFOs, which makes sense, since he always looks like he just got dropped off by one. [ As Giuliani ] They squeezed my head until ink came out and then dropped me off on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike! So, all in all, not one of my crazier days. So it's been a crazy week, but we've been on hiatus and it's Monday, so we're going to talk about the pants. This weekend, we all had to briefly ask ourselves, "Did Donald Trump put his pants on backwards?" Which, to be clear, he did not. But, still, if you opened Twitter at all this weekend -- and I didn't because I take Twitter off my phone when I'm on hiatus so my children have my full attention. And if you're wondering, is my life better without Twitter? Well, no, because I didn't find out until this morning that people thought Donald Trump maybe put his pants on backwards. And, again, let's be clear -- he did not put them on backwards, which is good for Trump because it would be very embarrassing to be the first president to put your pants on backwards, as opposed to what he is -- the first president where everyone believed it was at least possible, where even his own supporters had to say, "No, see, look, those are pleats, right?" But, again, would it really shock you if a guy whose pants look like this couldn't figure out how to put them on the right way? I mean, look at how baggy they are. Those aren't pants. They're an escape room. If you tied Trump to a mast, you could win the America's Cup. It's like if MC Hammer made business pants. And, yeah, yeah, it's a dated reference. But in the Meyers family, it is always Hammer time. And, yep, I did want a sample from "You Can't Touch This" to play right there, but I was given a hard no by the penny pinching NBC execs who didn't let me have anything nice! And I even said to them, "If 'This Is Us' wanted to play 'You Can't Touch This,' you'd let them." And they said to me, "Stop. Hammer time. [ Laughter ] And, again, no." So you can rest assured, the former president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the man who, for four years, singlehandedly controlled our nuclear arsenal with the power to destroy all life on Earth, knows how to put his pants on. Professional fact-checkers have now confirmed it. And I love that this country has gone so crazy that Snopes has started to sound like a weary substitute teacher. "No, he didn't have his pants on backwards and, no, you're not allowed to smoke weed, if you finish the quiz early." Also, did no one consider the possibility that Trump was wearing pants with a zipper in the front and the back? That is absolutely an idea that should be on "Shark Tank" and, if it hasn't yet, I call dibs. I'm going to start calling myself the MyZipper guy [ As Lindell ] and, yeah, I'm going to grow a mustache and start talking like that. The best thing about our pants is, [ Laughter ] with a zipper on both sides, you're not going to spend the whole day thinking, "Oh, boy, I hope I didn't put these on backwards." Now, to me, this dumb pants conspiracy theory was far more interesting than what Trump actually had to say at the rally, which I'm not going to bother to get into because it was the same deranged bull[bleep] he's been spouting for months about the election. At this point, he really needs to zip it, front and back. [ Laughter ] But what we do know is that it's apparently more than just propaganda aimed at dismantling democracy. Trump reportedly genuinely believes that, in a matter of months, he'll, somehow, be reinstated as president. -The New York Times' Maggie Haberman is reporting that Donald Trump has been telling a number of people that he expects he will be reinstated as president by August. -What he's doing is echoing things that are being said by Sidney Powell, who was his lawyer, although, you know, he distanced himself from her at certain points over the final months of the administration. But she was helping advise him on these efforts to overturn the election last year. This is being said by Michael Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, who has been pushing this for some time. He's echoing what they're saying. -If it weren't so dangerous, it'd be sad. He's puttering around his golf course, telling people he's getting ready to go back to the White House, like a guy who thinks his ex is going to take him back, even though she's already living with another dude. "I'm telling you, once they get back from their honeymoon in Cabo, she's going to unblock my number and break up with Brad. She told me, once, that six-packs are actually kind of a turnoff." [ Laughter ] It's insane for many reasons, not the least of which is that Trump thinks he's about to be reinstated in the White House, when he can't even keep a blog going. Wow, he's delusional and sociopathic, but, somehow, he's the only person on Earth who knows when it's time to shut down a blog. I mean, there are guys out there still writing about cheat codes for "Metal Gear Solid." And having less traffic than Petfinder is a real burn for Trump because this is a man who hates pets. If he started a website, it'd be called Petloser, where you could either, I don't know, call pets losers or a service where people would show up in a van and help lose your pet. "My kids love the dog, but I'm just really allergic." [ As Trump ] I don't need the reason. Just consider him lost. [ Laughter ] Get in the van. There's steak in there. [ Laughter ] Of course, it's not hard to imagine life without Trump's blog, considering the only noteworthy thing he did on it was call a horse a junkie. And, even then he used the wrong spelling of junkie. The noun more commonly ends in "-ie," not "-y." If I made that mistake, I'd have to devote an entire segment to it, where I slowly unravel as I set the record straight. We'd call it "Corrections" and put it online every Friday and everyone in my life would tell me it's a bad idea and I would respond to them, not as myself, but as a cicada. [ Campy voice ] Even someone who's been underground for 17 years knows "Corrections" is a hit. Personally, I just can't believe the guy from "The Needlers" has his own talk show now! [ Hoarsely, smoker's voice ] "You need help, man. You've got a problem." My problem? I hope you're not referring to my life expectancy! I'm going to live forever! [ Laughter ] See, you thought -- you dare to think, just because we took a week off, we weren't going to call back the cicada. Well, apparently you haven't been watching this show for the past 15 months. We're nutty with callbacks. [ Laughter ] I basically spent the entire hiatus working on my musical, "Cicada, Cicada ['sih-kah-duh']." [ Laughter ] It stars Christine Baranski as the cicada, Harvey Fierstein as the cockroach, and Nathan Lane as whoever the [bleep] he wants to be. [ Laughter ] We're currently looking for financial backers, but you should probably steer clear if you hate making money! [ Laughter ] I'm going to be so rich off MyZipper guy and "Cicada, Cicada," you will definitely be hearing MC Hammer say -- Just not yet. I got to be honest, MyZipper guy's not going well. [ Laughter ] It costs a fortune to put two zippers on pants. [ Laughter ] Now, it's easy to dismiss all of this as the collective delusion of a bunch of fringe loons. And, yeah, you know, maybe not the best idea to call someone else a fringe loon after that long cicada tangent, but, you know, what's done is done. [ Laughter ] And it's true that Lindell and Powell and the like are not exactly power brokers. Powell had to admit, in court, that reasonable people wouldn't believe the stuff she says. And Lindell just got dumped by his law firm one day after filing an insane lawsuit against voting machine companies. It also wouldn't surprise me if one, or both, of them pronounced it "coop." But, while these people are obvious cranks, it's also worth remembering that Michael Flynn was actually the national security advisor. And, on top of all that, we also just found out that, for weeks after the election, Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was still trying to get the Justice Department to use the levers of government to subvert the election and keep Trump in power. -New emails show that, in the last weeks of the Trump administration, then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows pushed the Department of Justice to investigate conspiracy theories about the election. That revelation, according to The New York Times report, shows Meadows repeatedly asked Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen -[ Clears throat ] -to look at claims of fraud in the 2020 election. One email requested the DOJ investigate a fantastical theory... -Alright, that's a new one. The chief of staff for the president of the United States thought Italy might've used satellites to tamper with voting machines. For one thing, have you ever been to Italy? If you ask them to tamper with an election in November, they might get around to it by March. Don't get me wrong. I love Italy. I took my wife there for our honeymoon and we're still waiting for our check. [ Laughter ] Seriously, these insane GOP conspiracy theories are starting to sound like election truther "Mad Libs." In Arizona, they're looking for bamboo in the ballots because they think they were smuggled in from China and, now, we find out the former chief of staff thought the election was stolen by Italian satellites. In fact, this insane theory got so far in the White House that, according to The Times... The Italygate is like the Stargate, except, instead of interstellar travel, it just dumps you behind some Vespas on a cobblestone street and you have to fight through a cloud of pigeons to make your way back. Or, even worse, the Italygate leads you to Rudy's apartment. [ As Giuliani ] Oh, no, not more aliens. The last one took my neck for experiments and forgot to put it back on. [ Laughter ] Italygate sounds like the last booth on the toll plaza to New Jersey. It's cash; E-ZPass; and the Italygate, where you just loudly negotiate. [ Italian accent ] I'm only making a quick errand, here. Give me a break. Stop your [bleep] honking! [ Laughter ] Then get [bleep] E-ZPass! [ Laughter ] So Democrats must take stock of the fact that this is the Republican Party they're dealing with -- a Republican Party whose most powerful figures are disseminating insane conspiracy theories about the election, calling for coups, trying to use the levers of power to subvert elections, and whose functionaries are trying to weaponize those lies, as we speak, by turning them into voter suppression laws. At least 14 states have enacted GOP laws making it harder to vote and Republicans who sought to overturn the last election are vying for positions as election officials in multiple states, which would put them in charge of the next election. It is insane and dangerous, for obvious reasons. It's like going to a salon run by Ted Cruz. [ As Cruz ] We can either trim your beard, or we can take the clippings from the floor and glue them to your face. In fact, the Republican attorney general in Texas just bragged to Steve Bannon that, if he hadn't made it harder to vote by mail in 2020, Trump might've lost Texas, too. -Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas. Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million. Those were all illegal and we were able to stop every one of them. Had we not done that, we would've been in the very same situation. We would've been, on election night -- I was watching election night and I knew, when I saw what was happening in these other states, that that would've been Texas. We would've been in the same boat. We would've been one of those battleground states that they were counting votes in Harris County for three days and Donald Trump would've lost the election. -They're not shy about it. They're just admitting it. For people who believe in a bunch of secret conspiracies, they're sure bad at keeping their actual conspiracies secret. It's like if, in the last Bond film, Blofeld just confessed to his plan in the first five minutes of the movie and then, he and Daniel Craig spent the next two hours hemming and hawing about bipartisanship. [ As Blofeld ] James, the voters want us to work together to destroy the world, yes! [ Laughter ] And, you know, I just can't wait to hear what all you correction hawks out there have to say about my Christoph Waltz impression. For those of you saying it sounds like Werner Herzog, you're too late. Snopes debunked that, too. [ Laughter ] And, yet, there are still those Democrats who simply refuse to confront the reality of the threat to democracy we're facing. Arguably, the loudest of those is West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who, this weekend, came out against a sweeping election reform bill passed by the House and said he refused to end the filibuster, in order to protect voting rights from Republican attacks. And, on Sunday, he offered a ludicrous defense of his view that so-called bipartisanship with Republicans was somehow possible. -By taking it off the table, haven't you empowered Republicans to be obstructionist? -I don't think so, because we have seven brave Republicans that continue to vote for what they know is right and the facts as they see them, not worrying about the political consequences. I believe there's a lot more of my Republican colleagues and friends who feel the same way. I'm just hoping they are able to rise to the occasion, to defend our country and support our country and make sure that we have a democracy, for this republic, of all the people. -Senator McConnell, the head of the Republicans in the Senate, says that he's 100% focused on blocking the Biden agenda. Question -- aren't you being naive about this continuing talk about bipartisan cooperation? -I'm not being naive. I think he's 100% wrong in trying to block all the good things that we're trying to do for America. -I mean, do you hear yourself, though? You don't think you're being naive, but you also think Republicans will rise to the occasion? These people think the election was rigged by Hugo Chávez, bamboo ballots, and Italian satellites. Sounds like a [bleep] "We Didn't Start the Fire" remix. All they're missing is a theory about how dead people, like Buddy Holly and Ben-Hur, voted for Biden using ballots smuggled in by space monkeys in the Mafia. ♪ Bamboo ballots smuggled in ♪ ♪ Cicadas are back again! ♪ [ Laughter ] Manchin, and others like him, have to get real about the threat to democracy posed by Republicans and his fellow Democrats have to put more pressure on him to confront that reality and do something about it. Otherwise, if Republicans get their way, there's a good chance that, come the next election, you'll only be allowed to vote if you own a... -MyPillow. -This has been -- [ Laughter ] I feel like somebody should've told Maggie like, "You're the closer. Have a little more life to it," you know? [ Laughter ] This has been "A Closer Look." ♪♪ God's Love We Deliver cooks and brings over two million meals a year to men, women, and children living with HIV/AIDS, cancer, and other serious illnesses and they need your help, now, more than ever. If you're watching this online, you can hit the Donate button. Stay safe. Wear a mask. Get vaccinated. We love you.
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Channel: Late Night with Seth Meyers
Views: 1,468,319
Rating: 4.898356 out of 5
Keywords: Late, Night, with, Seth, Meyers, Patrick Wilson, Quinta Brunson, NBC, NBC TV, television, funny, talk show, comedy, humor, stand-up, parody, snl seth meyers, host, promo, seth, meyers, weekend update, news satire, satire, Donald Trump, Capitol, US Capitol, Insurrection, January 6th, Capitol Riots, Capitol Insurrection, Investigation, Trump Investigation, Current News, Joe Biden, Biden, Kamala Harris, Kamala, White House, politics, news, current news, Trump, President, Vice President
Id: pu74qiprKd4
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Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)
Published: Mon Jun 07 2021
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