Late-night hosts respond to ignorance over indentured servants, Native American history and the power of Jeff Bezos’s vocabulary.

Trevor Noah

Virginia governor Ralph Northam embarked on an apology tour over the weekend, a week after a yearbook photo with blackface and a Ku Klux Klan costume brought calls for his resignation.

In an interview with Gayle King, Northam said he won’t step down because he’s learned his lesson. But “the question is: what exactly has he learned?” asked Trevor Noah on Monday’s Daily Show.

Northam acknowledged that he’s a beneficiary of white privilege, as reports emerged that staff have supplied him a race re-education diet of the novel Roots and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article “The Case for Reparations”.

“Whoa, somebody has been studying hard at woke night school!” Noah commented. And though “you shouldn’t have to read Roots to know that blackface is wrong”, Noah said, you have to give credit to Northam “for trying to learn and improve”.

But Northam is the “the Michael Scott of politics” – a reference to Steve Carrell’s well-intentioned yet chronically cringe-y character from The Office – and he continued to land in hot water; in the King interview, Northam referred to slaves brought to Virginia in 1619 as “indentured servants”.

“That’s a nice way to say slavery”, Noah said. “What do you call blackface, ‘extreme tanning?’ What do you call AIDS, ‘permanent flu’? What do you call a tsunami, ‘Aquaman in 3D?’”

Perhaps surprisingly, despite the continued eye rolls, a poll from George Mason University, located in Virginia, said that 58% of African American residents preferred that Northam remain governor, compared to 47% of overall Virginians.

That didn’t surprise Noah. “It makes total sense”, he said. “Think about it – to black people, especially in Virginia, every white guy serving in office has probably done some racist shit in their past. So you might as well have a white guy who has already been caught and feels bad about it – because you know that guy is never messing up again – and now he has a racism debt that he has to pay off.”

White guilt could be “very useful,” Noah said – possible leverage for better schools, criminal justice reform or a holiday on Beyoncé’s birthday.

Seth Meyers

On Late Night, Seth Meyers turned to the 2020 campaign trail, where a historic number of women – six – have entered the race. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota announced her bid in a snow-covered rally this weekend – weather that Trump confused, of course, with evidence refuting climate change.

“Why do we have to keep explaining to the president of the United States that weather and climate are two different things?” Meyers asked. “We live in a country where science teachers have to tell their students, ‘I don’t care what the president said.’”

Trump also lashed out at Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts on Twitter this weekend; in a tweet, he referenced her specious history of claiming Native American heritage and said he would see her “on the campaign TRAIL” – seemingly a reference to the Trail of Tears, the forced removal and genocide of thousands of Cherokees under President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. Many called foul on the tweet, though some prominent conservatives claimed it couldn’t be a racist reference because, well, Trump doesn’t know about the Trail of Tears.

“They’re actually defending Trump by saying he’s too dumb to be racist,” Meyers said, exasperated. He wasn’t buying it, either. “If you ever find yourself asking is Trump dumb or is he racist, the answer is most likely C, all of the above.”

Stephen Colbert

On the Late Show, Colbert focused on the very public smackdown between National Enquirer CEO and Trump ally David Pecker and “world’s wealthiest cage-free egg”, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Last week, Bezos published emails from the National Enquirer which threatened to publish seminude photos of the billionaire if he didn’t publicly state that there were no political motivations his unflattering coverage in the tabloid. Bezos titled his blog post “No thank you, Mr Pecker,” which is also “exactly how I feel about seeing Jeff Bezos’s penis”, joked Colbert.

Bezos said he committed whatever budget necessary to find how the intimate text messages got in the hands of the National Enquirer. The investigation has brought up some familiar names: Michael Sanchez, brother of Bezos’s girlfriend, is a close friend of disgraced Trump associate and over-dresser Roger Stone. “Come on, would Roger Stone really stoop to a phone hack or blackmail?” Colbert commented. “That would take away valuable time he could spend bulldozing a dog orphanage in a Disney movie.”

Bezos believes the blackmail was political, calling his ownership of the Washington Post a situational “complexifier”.

“I think Jeff Bezos just redefinified a brandastical new wordity,” said Colbert. Good news, Colbert said, because after “manhood” and “sexts”, “I think the best euphemism for penis is ‘complexifier’.”

