Like so many others, Seth Meyers isn’t very optimistic that the January 6th hearings are going to do much to change the minds of Donald Trump’s greatest admirers and champions. As the Late Night host said on Thursday:
“We’ve been through a seven-year-long onslaught of Trump scandals, including two impeachments, a violent coup, and a sex scandal in which he paid hush money during a presidential campaign to cover up an affair with a porn star and lied about it up until the point where the actual check he personally wrote to make the payment surfaced with his signature on it.”
So it hardly seems likely that Trump die-hards—who are still standing behind the former president and probably aren’t even watching the hearings—are going to turn their backs on him now. But what Meyers finds even more shocking is that none of the people who have propped Trump up along the way and helped to foment the insurrection at the Capitol have not yet been thrown in the clink for the part they played in the deadly riots of January 6th.
Meyers replayed the part of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony, in which she claimed that former White House counsel Pat Cipollone—on the morning of January 6th—asked her to make sure that no one in the Trump administration went to the Capitol and lamented, in her words, “something to the effect of… ‘We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement [to the Capitol] happen.’” When asked by Liz Cheney if any specific crimes were mentioned, Hutchinson replied that in the days leading up to the 6th, they had talked about “obstruction of justice or defrauding the electoral count.” Meyers could barely believe what he was hearing:
“It’s truly mind-boggling to me that none of these guys are in jail yet when they themselves were expecting to end up in jail. Merrick Garland’s still poring over transcripts looking for a smoking gun. Meanwhile, on January 6th, Trump aides were all on Pinterest searching for ‘ways to accessorize your orange jumpsuit.’”
Meyers went on to state that Cipollone’s alleged comment “was not just a one-time freakout on January 6th, as Hutchinson made clear in that clip… Think about it: they even named the specific laws they were breaking. They literally laid out a blueprint for prosecutors to arrest them. I mean, how much easier could you make it? This is like if, on every page, Waldo was holding up a giant sign that said, ‘I’M RIGHT HERE YOU IDIOT.’”
Yet here we are with Trump and his many law-breaking cronies roaming free (at least for now) and making excuse after excuse for why they did nothing wrong.
You can watch the full clip above.