What is a national emergency? What powers does a president have? Late-night hosts added some facts and figures to Donald Trump’s primetime address on the so-called “border crisis”.

Trevor Noah

Trump’s primetime national address brought up two important questions for The Daily Show: what is a national emergency, and what can a president do with it? It’s not like national emergencies haven’t happened before.

“Presidents declare national emergencies all the time,” Trevor Noah said. “What they don’t do is declare national emergencies to win a policy fight with Congress.”

The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) You thought Congress would be specific about what a president can call a “national emergency”? Think again. pic.twitter.com/tRsx1UTqVR

The supreme court, Noah continued, has already ruled that for a situation to be considered a national emergency, it must be “urgent, infrequent and unexpected”.

In other words: “America should have a urinary tract infection,” Noah joked. The supreme court’s criteria don’t really apply to illegal immigration, “which has more of a steady constant drip”, Noah said. “Still needs to be checked out, but it’s not an emergency.”

Seth Meyers on government shutdown: 'We are in a self-inflicted crisis' Read more

Qualifications aside, during a national emergency, a president has startlingly expansive powers – ability to shut down communication facilities, freeze bank accounts, martial law. You would think, Noah said, that if Congress was going to authorize those powers to a president, “they would be specific about how the president could use them. And if you thought that, you would be thinking wrong.”

Instead, Congress left the language intentionally vague because what counts as an emergency, Noah observed, is “different for different people”.

“For some people, an emergency is black people barbecuing,” he said. “For other people, waiting for those three dots in a text message is an emergency.”

In other words, the first Congress “assumed the president would be somebody responsible and trustworthy and potty-trained”. They didn’t count on a president who amounts to what Noah termed “the black light on American democracy”, exposing democratic loopholes (the president might be able to pardon himself, or not divest from businesses, or show his tax returns) and old mustard stains left and right.

Stephen Colbert

Though The Late Show was taped at 5.30pm, hours before Trump’s address, Stephen Colbert had no issue responding to the speech anyway. Colbert admitted that he felt “queasy” on election night because he foresaw an event as surreal as Trump broadcasting from the Oval Office. It was only a matter of time, because the former Celebrity Apprentice host “just misses being on television”, Colbert said.

“It’s like when your cousin is staying with you and he brings his dog – you immediately imagine it pooping on your rug. And then eventually it does.”

By The Late Show’s taping, it was already reported that Trump was not planning to declare a national emergency to build a border wall – the signature campaign promise that precipitated the government shutdown – without congressional approval. Such a scenario is “all up Trump’s alley”, Colbert said. “Remember, he got elected without the voters’ approval.”

Could Trump legally declare a national emergency over the border that is seeing a 20-year low in illegal crossings? Technically, yes. It’s legal gray area, but what constitutes a national emergency is up to a president’s discretion. In other words: “We’re in what legal scholars call an Air Bud scenario,” joked Colbert. “There’s nothing in the rule book that says a golden retriever can’t declare martial law.”

And to drum up enough fear to justify the emergency, Colbert continued, the White House “pulled Mike Pence away from his meal of tap water and hard-boiled toast” to preview Trump’s speech on cable news, where he claimed that 17,000 criminals had been apprehended at the border last year.

Colbert broke down that figure. In fact, only 6,259 people apprehended at the border were found to have criminal convictions – half of them for trying to cross the border.

“So half the criminals who are trying to cross the border are only criminals for trying to cross the border,” Colbert observed. “That’s a real catch-22. As in, they said they caught 17,000 [people] but it was more like 22.”

Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel, meanwhile, responded to the presidential address with a suggestion for Trump: get scarier.

“If you’re Donald Trump, and you make a dumb promise during your campaign 200 times” and you need to get “people panicked enough to waste $5bn” on said promise, then “going on TV and telling us there are bad hombres sneaking over the border – that’s not going to do it,” said Kimmel. “We have plenty of bad hombres here already.

“If you really want to make up a fake border crisis, then make it a scary border crisis,” he continued. “Go on TV and … say there is an army of chupacabras crawling in from Tijuana.

“You want to build a wall, this is how you do it,” Kimmel said as he introduced a video which dubs “chupacabra” over “immigrants”.

In contrast to his suggestion, Trump seemed sedated in his address, Kimmel said. “It was like somebody slipped a Xanax into his McFlurry this afternoon.”