Late-night hosts looked for the real national emergency.

Seth Meyers

Late-night hosts had all weekend to process Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to go around Congress for border wall funding, and on Monday night, Seth Meyers came out swinging.

“It’s more obvious every day that Trump’s natural inclination is to be a dictator,”, said the Late Night host.

Trump “would be even scarier if he weren’t so easily distracted,” Meyers continued, but it took less than 24 hours for the president to escape to Florida for a weekend of golf and omelet bars.

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“There’s no clearer sign that this is not a real emergency than the fact that he is at an omelet bar,” joked Meyers of a viral photo of a tan tracksuit-clad Trump ordering breakfast. “In a real emergency, no one goes to the omelet bar.”

In his announcement on Friday, which Meyers called “less of an explanation and more of a singsong ramble ... He sounds like a five-year-old telling you what he saw at the zoo.” Trump anticipated a court challenge to his national emergency on constitutional grounds. Over the weekend, 16 states filed lawsuits challenging the order, demanding that the Trump administration demonstrate the necessity of a national emergency. “If Trump has any chance of winning in court at all, he has to insist that this was his only choice,” Meyers explained. There was “one thing he had to say: this is a real emergency, we had to do it this way”.

Trump, true to form, boasted in his speech that for the national emergency: “I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.”

“That’s the exact opposite of an emergency. That’s a choice,” Meyers countered. “That’s like saying: ‘I’m having emergency surgery to get butt implants.’”

Stephen Colbert

“We need all the smile files we can get right now,” said Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. To recap, Trump called a national emergency to secure funding for a border wall after Congress, fresh off a midterm election in which voters elected a fresh wave of Democrats into the House, refused to authorize it. “Congress wouldn’t give him money for the thing the voters didn’t want, so [Trump] shut down the government to get the money for the thing that no one was asking for,” Colbert explained.

Although to anyone watching Friday’s speech, it was clear from the very beginning that the “true emergency was taking place in his skull”.

“Imagine your grandpa wandering out into the garden to yell at the trees about Mexicans,” Colbert said of the speech. “That’s sort of what it felt like.”

The rambling address touched on many topics, mostly unrelated to the nominal purpose of the address – trade with China, immigrant caravans, Brexit, drug dealers, the troops, “how he’s taller than any other president except Lincoln and a lot of people are saying Lincoln wasn’t really that tall, it was mostly hat”, Colbert enumerated, “how Rush Limbaugh can speak for three hours straight, how beautiful the chairs in the Oval Office are, how he should cancel the Mueller investigation and use that money for factories that ‘make good pants’”.

“I only made a couple of those up, and you don’t know which ones,” he pointedly concluded.

Trevor Noah

“The border wall,” Trevor Noah began The Daily Show with a shake of his head. “Mexico refused to pay for it. Congress refused to pay for it. He tried to put it on Jared [Kushner’s] credit card but couldn’t figure out how the chip worked.”

So now America is four days into a national emergency to scrounge up money for a physical border wall – a solution which, Noah observed, is a “very gradual response to an emergency”.

But as Meyers and Colbert also pointed out, Trump didn’t make a very good case for the emergency nature of the southern border (which he has routinely mischaracterized or exaggerated) in his speech Friday. Telling reporters that “I didn’t need to do this”, Trump “sort of negates his entire argument”, said Noah.

Noah, however, was more focused on Trump’s peculiar delivery of portions of the speech, in which he adopted a singsongy, repetitive cadence. Also repetitive: Trump acting in exactly the ways for which he criticized former president Barack Obama. The Daily Show pulled together a series of clips in which Trump lambasted Obama for executive actions far less drastic than the national emergency for wall money, sometimes in the same circular, almost-singing pattern.

“So there you have it,” Noah said in a mock-Trump half-song. “Once again, President Trump is full of shit. He criticized Obama for the thing he’s doing now, but you’ll thank Trump when the national emergency is over in three to five years, provided the drug dealers don’t figure out how to build tunnels.”