Jimmy Kimmel

It was “another episode on the Real White House Wives of Orange”, Jimmy Kimmel said Thursday night, after a breakneck day of news from Washington. On Wednesday, days after it was revealed that an intelligence official filed a whistleblower complaint over Donald Trump’s conduct with an unnamed foreign leader – “somebody finally pulled the fire alarm in hell”, Kimmel said – the White House released an edited transcript of Trump’s call with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the president of Ukraine. On Thursday, the House intelligence committee released the full complaint.

The complaint’s allegations are, to put it mildly, explosive. “If this isn’t it, nothing will be,” said Kimmel. “This grabs Trump by the McNuggets and doesn’t ask permission.”

The complaint goes beyond the call transcript, in which Trump asked Zelenskiy to “do us a favor” – investigate political rival Joe Biden – in a conversation about America’s military aid to Ukraine, which Trump had stalled. According to the complaint, White House officials were immediately concerned by the 25 July phone call, so they moved the record from its usual server to a less accessible, top-secret one reserved for sensitive matters of national security.

The alleged cover-up is “ironic, indeed”, Kimmel said. “A conspiracy to hide evidence on a private server. You can hear Hillary screaming all the way from the woods of Chappaqua.”

The best part of this mess, Kimmel added, is that Trump released the transcript of the Ukrainian call himself. “He basically screwed himself,” Kimmel joked. “This is the closest Donald Trump has ever come to having sex with someone his own age.”

Stephen Colbert

“The news has been moving on us like a bitch,” said Stephen Colbert on the Late Show. “A lot of people are celebrating because Donald Trump is in serious trouble, but Trump has shown over and over again that when he’s cornered, he will fight like the rabid weasel that lives on his head.”

Republicans, meanwhile, have “shown that they’ll go along with whatever he does no matter what”, Colbert said. “So this isn’t going to be so much light at the end of the tunnel as a long fall down a dark and dirty pit.”

Colbert then focused on the whistleblower’s details of a cover-up in his complaint, particularly the White House’s move to bury the phone records on a more secure computer server. “A different computer server?” Colbert said, bemused. “Is everything Trump accuses someone else of, something he’s done?”

Trump, Colbert noted, has not been taking the news well; on Thursday, he “tweet-screamed”, in all caps: “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO RUIN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND ALL THAT IT STANDS FOR”

“But, you beat ’em to it,” Colbert responded.

Trevor Noah

“The whistleblower’s complaint has accused the president of soliciting foreign interference in America’s election,” said Trevor Noah on the Daily Show. It’s definitely bad news for Trump, he continued, but even worse? The entire complaint is only nine pages long, “which means that people might actually read it. Hell, if it had a few pictures, Trump himself might actually read it.”

Did this whistleblower’s report just blow the lid off the Trump presidency? pic.twitter.com/DKy8eIpHQw — The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) September 27, 2019

The complaint accuses Trump of pressuring the Ukrainians, while Trump and his people say they did nothing wrong – the call he made to Zelenskiy was “perfect”.

“But here’s the thing,” Noah refuted. “If there was nothing shady about that call, then why did the White House staff work so hard to make sure it never saw the light of day?”

The relocation of the call record to a top-secret computer server is particularly damning, Noah said. “That’s something you only do if you’re trying to hide shady shit.

“Like if you came home from school, and your parents told you that grandpa died of natural causes and we threw his body in the river, you would have some follow-up questions.”

Like Colbert and Kimmel, the irony of another private server scandal was not lost on Noah. “Yes, this is a new scandal about a private server,” he said. “Hashtag throwback Thursday.”

Seth Meyers

The memo on Trump’s phone call with Zelenskiy was already damning, said Seth Meyers on Late Night, but the whistleblower complaint is even more concerning. In particular, Meyers focused on the alleged cover-up of storing the call record on a more secret computer server where fewer people could access it.

“It makes it incredibly obvious that this was a cover-up,” said Meyers. “It’s like if your husband had a folder on his desktop that said, ‘work stuff, not porn’.”

Meyers also zoomed in on the role of Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer, who continues to appear on cable news and make incriminating statements about himself and the president.

Meyers had a theory for these seemingly bold self-owns: “When Rudy and Trump and their cohorts are huddled in the White House or on Air Force One, they all make perfect sense to each other. They don’t even realize the plans they’re making are crimes. It’s like when you and your friends take mushrooms in the back bedroom and you’re throwing theories around, you feel like geniuses.

“Then, you leave the back bedroom but you forgot your mom’s having her book club, and suddenly, the moment they all look at you, you realize: oh no. We’re really fucking high.”