On Wednesday night, Seth Meyers praised “the closest look we've ever seen in our fucking lives,” as Late night The segment was moved to prime time and delved into Tuesday's presidential debate.
Tuesday's debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump drew a significantly larger audience than June's debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, with many arguing that Harris fared far better than Trump.
Meyers began his analysis with a segment on conservative pundits trying to distort the former president's mediocre performance, citing a clip arguing that Trump's opening and closing statements at least left a good impression.
“If you just look at those two parts, the first and last impressions, you might not get the impression that he did well,” the commentator said.
“That's a good point, that's a great point,” Meyers said. “If there was anyone who watched a debate that way, yeah, if you tuned in at 9:00, fell asleep at 9:03, and then woke up 89 minutes later, you might think, 'Hey, Trump did well!'”
Meyers's complete monologue “A Closer Look,” which typically runs about 12 minutes at the beginning of a Late night The episode ran for approximately 50 minutes in total during the prime time broadcast and was recorded live.
THE Late night The host also touched on Trump’s previous claim that he would agree to have more debates with Harris, a claim that the former president appeared to backtrack from at the end of the debate on Tuesday.
“Because the first one was a disaster, and the second one would have been super fun,” Meyers said, before playing a clip of Harris’s victory speech after her performance. “She looks like a mom toasting two glasses of wine at a wedding.”
He later showed a clip of Trump claiming he had incredibly high approval ratings, and joked that the former president was taking the numbers from his Approval Statistics System, or ASS.
“I like the idea that Trump thinks he can make up for a bad debate performance by walking into the conference room and shouting out random numbers like he’s behind the counter at a deli,” Meyers said.
He then touched on the news of Taylor Swift's endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket, which came shortly after the debate concluded on Tuesday. Meyers showed a clip of Tim Walz learning of the endorsement on live television.
“That's the face of a guy who just realized he's one step closer to getting Taylor Swift tickets,” Walz said. “He's beaming. He looks like he just found out that Menards has a sale on gutters and 10 percent off leaf blowers.”
After a commercial break, Meyers touched on the importance of the debate with a reference to its prime-time slot.
“I don't have to tell you that the stakes of this debate couldn't have been higher,” Meyers said. “I've been moved from 12:30 to 10. If you see me on TV before I'm in my pajamas, it's an emergency.”
Later in the monologue, Meyers also addressed Trump's viral comments about people eating dogs and cats in Ohio. When debate host David Muir pushed back on Trump's claims, the former president responded, “There are people on television saying my dog was taken and used for food.”
“If you don’t want to sound like a crazy old man, there’s no worse thing you can say than, ‘The people on television said so,’” Meyers said.
He continued, “Trump was fact-checked multiple times last night, and Harris was not fact-checked at all. And yes, there are absolutely things you can argue with Harris about, but it's one thing to fact-check someone on the granular nature of their position on fracking. It's another thing to say no, people don't eat dogs.”