-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
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Why no adult diapers jokes?