Comedians scathing on Trump over violence

Two sides, not many, and one ‘ had Nazis on it’

U.S. President Donald Trump has attacked a long list of people and groups, late-night comedians noted Monday in the aftermath of deadly weekend violence in Charlottesville, Va. Yet it took him two days to condemn the Ku Klux Klan, neo- Nazis and other white supremacy groups who had gathered there.

“Was that so hard? Why did that take two days?” asked Late Show host Stephen Colbert.

“It shouldn’t take longer for the president to do the right thing than it takes to get a package from Amazon,” said Seth Meyers of Late Night.

“He sounds l i ke a kid whose parents made him apologize for egging their neighbour’s house,” said Jimmy Kimmel, host of Jimmy Kimmel Live!

“The whole thing is such a bummer because Nazis were like the last thing we all agreed on,” Meyers added. “Indiana Jones fought the Nazis and we love Indiana Jones!”

They rattled off lists of people the president had found easier to criticize.

Just in the l ast week, Meyers said, the president “slammed the Senate Majority Leader of his own party and got into a war of words with North Korea.” Trump, he noted, has excoriated the likes of former presidential candidate Jeb Bush and even “people who drink Diet Coke.”

Colbert’s list was longer: “Hillary Clinton, the New York Times, CNN, Joe Scarborough, Kristen Stewart and the cast of Hamilton, Diet Coke, Nordstrom not selling his daughter’s clothes, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the mayor of London Sadiq Khan, me, the state of New Hampshire, Gold Star families, Penn Jillette’s Las Vegas show, the movie Django Unchained, Meryl Streep and Lady Ghostbusters.”

As Kimmel said, “When Donald Trump is upset ... he doesn’t keep it bottled up, he lets us know.”

While the comedians criticized the president as well as voiced their dismay over the weekend events that unfolded, there were elements of humour, too. “We went into the weekend wondering about Kim Jong Un starting a war,” Kimmel said. “We came out of it wondering if our president was cutting eyeholes out of his bedsheets.”

T he c o medians also poked fun at Trump’s comments Saturday, in which he referred to the violence in Charlottesville as coming from “many sides.” He did not identify the groups he viewed as disruptive. “How can you possibly say you condemn this in the strongest possible terms when you don’t even name the groups responsible or say what they did?” Colbert said. “I have seen angrier Yelp reviews. And they weren’t afraid to use the word ‘ Nazi’ when describing how long their jalapeno poppers took.”

“There were two sides, not many sides,” Kimmel said. “And one of those sides had Nazis on it.”