Comics, including Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, discussed Trump’s relationship with Fox News and the administration’s response to the opioid epidemic

Late-night on Thursday hosts addressed Donald Trump’s interview with Fox News anchor Lou Dobbs, as well as the administration’s response to the opioid epidemic.

“Sometimes I feel sorry for Donald Trump, but not as often as he does,” Stephen Colbert began. “He’s always complaining about his media coverage. So last night, he just unplugged, got away from it all, and sat down for his 19th interview with Fox News. In this case, it was a full-blown rubdown from anchor and unrefrigerated Lou Dobbs Lou Dobbs.”

Late-night hosts call Trump 'the crazy old guy yelling on his front lawn' Read more

Colbert showed clips of the interview, in which Dobbs told the president the country “owed him a great debt” and that he was “everything as advertised” and had “accomplished so much”.

“I’d say that Dobbs was lobbing softballs, but if that interview was any indication, he doesn’t have balls,” Colbert joked. “Dobbs was pleasuring Trump so vigorously that Mike Pence asked mother to change the channel. Trump then explained how terrible the media’s coverage of him is.”

Colbert showed more clips from Trump’s interview, in which the president expressed his disdain for the media turning “good stories” into bad ones.

“Dobbs was so massaging Trump’s, let’s say, ego, that he didn’t even get around to asking Trump about Puerto Rico, where three-quarters of the residents are still without power,” Colbert explained. “The repair job to the grid and the power plants is a $300m contract and it has been awarded to a company called Whitefish Energy, which really sounds like a trout-based boner pill.”

Seth Meyers on Trump and Xi

Seth Meyers also weighed in on Trump’s interview with Dobbs.

“Just in the past week, senior members of the Republican party said that the president is a threat to democracy and national security,” Meyers began. He showed footage from Trump’s Wednesday interview on the White House lawn, in which the president said he had “one of the all-time great memories” and that, having gone to an Ivy-League university, he was “a very intelligent person”.

“So Trump is supposedly a very intelligent person with the world’s greatest memory and people are saying unbelievable things about him,” Meyers summarized. “To be fair, you might also have an inflated ego if there was a whole TV channel dedicated to showering you with praise.”





“Later in the Fox interview, Trump got a chance to show off that Ivy League education when talking about his relationship with China’s president, who was just granted enormous new powers,” the host explained. “So let’s see our Ivy League-educated president talk about perhaps the most important bilateral relationship in the world.”



In the interview with Dobbs, Trump claimed people said he and Xi Jinping had “one of the best relationships of any president-president”, explaining that Xi was “called president also” and not “the king of China”.

“Incidentally, ‘president-president’ sounds like how you’d describe someone in comparison to Trump,” Meyers joked. “‘Sure, Trump is a president, but Obama was a president president.”



Trevor Noah on the opioid epidemic

Finally, Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah addressed the opioid epidemic, which the Trump administration initially vowed to declare a national emergency but yesterday declared a public health emergency instead.

“How did this crisis get out of control?” Noah asked. “A big part of it is that for decades a lot of doctors were freely prescribing opioids to almost any level of pain. Doctors would just give out pills for everything: back pain, toothaches, fomo, whatever. And once people were addicted, they were desperate to get their pills and the pharmaceutical industry was more than happy to keep selling them.”

He showed news coverage of the town of Kermit, West Virginia, where, despite a population of just 392 people, a pharmacy reportedly ordered 9 million hydrocodone pills over two years.

“Holy shit, 9 million pills for 400 people?” Noah said. “Even if one of those people is Charlie Sheen, that still leaves 8 million pills unaccounted for. Now, you would think this would be an easy problem to solve. You just get the DEA in to shut down the pill distributor that’s flooding the market with all these drugs. The problem is, last year, those bitch-asses in Congress unanimously passed a law greatly cutting the DEA’s power to go after these shady pill distributors.”

Trevor Noah on the opioid epidemic

“And if you’re wondering: why would Congress pass a law helping to protect drug companies in the middle of a crisis? Well, it’s because of the thing that they’re addicted to: money,” Noah said, detailing the $2.4bn spent over the last decade on lobbying members of Congress.



“So the opioid crisis is huge and the pharmaceutical industry isn’t really interested in helping,” Noah continued. “But fortunately, my friends, as we saw in August, there’s one man who gets it.”



Trump declares health emergency over opioids but no new funds to help Read more

Noah showed Trump, speaking in August, announcing his plans to declare the opioid crisis a national emergency; the administration, though, only declared it a public health crisis Thursday, a solution that limits the government’s ability to use federal funds in addressing the crisis.

“You see, a national emergency means the government would have had access to $23b to help fight the opioid epidemic,” Noah explained. “That’s what Trump promised. What Trump actually signed was a public health emergency which gives the government access to a fund that currently has $57,000 in it.”