Late-night hosts continued their discussion of Donald Trump’s latest racist tweets, focusing on his party’s inability to deal with his bigotry correctly.

Seth Meyers

Stephen Colbert on Trump: 'Old-school racism minus the school' Read more

On Late Night, Seth Meyers spoke about the ongoing debate over whether the tweets, telling four Democratic congresswomen of colour to go back to where they came from, were in fact racist “despite the fact that they are definitely super racist”.

Meyers pointed out that, given that three of the women were born in America and the fourth has been a citizen since her childhood, then the comment was a self-own. “If their country is broken and crime-infested then that’s on you,” he said.

During the week, the president refused to back down. “Trump’s brain disease won’t let him backtrack no matter how far over the line he goes,” Meyers noted.

He continued: “These congresswomen do love our country, as evidenced by the fact that they’ve chosen to spend their time and energy in Congress despite having to deal with your bullshit every day.”

Meyers joked that living in Trump’s America can have an ageing effect. “Who needs FaceApp when you have Trump as president?” he said. He also suggested switching the comment back on Trump himself. “I’d tell him to go back to where he came from but I’m pretty sure he just appeared after a bunch of teens played with a Ouija board they found in the woods,” he said.

Republicans have failed to call out Trump’s words and have tried a number of embarrassing ways to avoid talking about the subject, including pretending they’re not aware. “The only way you could support Trump without lying at this point is if you have the part of your brain that’s responsible for memory replaced with the brain of a goldfish,” he said.

Meyers continued: “The same guys who said they’d stand up to Trump are now working for him, hiding in elevators to avoid criticising the racism and corruption.”

Samantha Bee

On Full Frontal, Samantha Bee said she would focus on “the three racist-est things Trump has been up to lately” leading into coverage of his tweets. She referred to Kellyanne Conway as Trump’s “spokesgolem” as she played footage of her confronting a journalist by asking him what his ethnicity was after he asked about Trump’s comments. “That’s also how she answers the phone,” Bee joked.

Bee then criticised how some publications have been wary of calling out Trump’s racism, in particular the New York Times, which used the headline: “Trump fans the flames of a racial fire”, which she said “sounds more like the title of Jeff Sessions’ horny Confederate fan fiction”.

Republicans have also tried to criticise the four women for comparing border centres to concentration camps. “These horrific border facilities absolutely meet the definition of concentration camps as defined by concentration camp survivors,” she said.

The government now refers to asylum as a “discretionary benefit”, which Bee said sounds more like the definition of “free makeup samples at Sephora”.

She added: “Trump isn’t just trying to stop illegal immigration, he’s also trying to stop legal immigration. It’s almost as if he doesn’t like people from certain parts of the world or something. Gah, if only there were a word for that.”

Stephen Colbert

On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert started by saying: “Well, I say, if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it probably just told the geese to go back to Canada.”

He spoke about Trump’s critique that these congresswomen are “wedded to bitterness and hate”, which led Colbert to quip: “You know it’s serious when Trump starts quoting his wedding vows.”

He said that the process of Republicans defining Trump as racist is delicate but that “they make it look easy and stupid” before showing footage of a defensive Eric Trump, “the dullest knife in the presidential drawer”.

Trevor Noah

The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) Apparently there’s a congressional rule against calling the president racist… can we get a rule against having a president BE racist? pic.twitter.com/VtST40kwSG

On The Daily Show, Trevor Noah spoke about the rule that states that a sitting president can’t be defined as racist. “Congress couldn’t even call Trump racist if he walked into the Capitol wearing full blackface,” he said.

One of the many misjudged defences from Republicans includes the thinking that Trump didn’t actually say race or refer explicitly to race in his tweets. “You can still be racist without saying someone’s race, we all know this shit,” Noah said.

In conclusion, he added: “Maybe some day in the future, they’ll write another rule saying that the president isn’t allowed to be racist.”