Mon Night Monologues: 10 Strikes and You’re Out

3 min read

By Dennis Perkins

As admirably as Judge Juan Merchan has scoffed at Donald Trump’s legal team and its increasingly ridiculous and sweaty excuses for their client’s flagrant flouting of the gag order against him, the fact that Trump was issued his tenth contempt of court judgement (and measly $1,000 fine) on Monday for attacking the jurors and officers of the court in his criminal trial had late-night hosts looking for new ways to express their incredulity. With the judge putting it in writing that the next violation will quite probably mean jail time for Trump, at least that mental picture seemed to jazz up the hosts, with Jimmy Kimmel looking eagerly forward to the inevitable, noting, “It’s like trying to get a dog to stop licking itself. It’s his nature.”

The Up-Sucky Veepstakes

With a Presidential election upon which our entire system of democracy hinges a mere six months away, it’s not too early to handicap the concurrent race to be GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential pick. In true Trump fashion, the former President and current criminal defendant has set up a political beauty pageant of sorts in advance of his pick to replace Mike Pence (who narrowly avoided being lynched by Trump’s insurrectionist pals), leading to a flurry of sycophantic TV appearances over the weekend.

And while former frontrunner Kristi Noem stumbled at the first hurdle (one clearly marked, ‘Do not brag about shooting puppies in the face”), South Carolina Senator and failed Trump presidential challenger Tim Scott leapt into the suck-up sweepstakes lead by refusing to commit to accepting any non-Trump 2024 election results, despite being asked to do so multiple times point-blank by MSNBC’s Kristen Welker. As we look forward to weeks of boot-licking and non-answers from power-hungry Veep wannabes, many of whom are on the record condemning Trump in the past, The Daily Show‘s Jordan Klepper summed up the warning signs: “This is how humiliating it is to be on Trump’s team. Normal questions become trick questions. Do you accept the election results? Should you look directly into an eclipse?”

Noem Chance in Hell

Of course, the former MAGA minion most likely to replace Mike Pence had been South Dakota Governor and proud puppy-murderer Kristi Noem. (Read that sentence again if you want to recalculate your Republican Vice Presidential betting pool.) Strangely, late-night hosts are loath to let this one go. Maybe it’s the fact that Noem also bragged about shooting a family goat, almost as an afterthought. Or three family horses. Or that she’s doubled and even tripled down on her pooch-y bloodlust in interviews, attempting at various times to claim little Cricket (for ’twas the dog’s name) was a danger to her children, or that that’s just the way things go in South Dakota.

And in case that whole… unpleasantness wasn’t enough to scuttle the otherwise right-up-Trump’s-alley potential running mate’s chances, reports came out this weekend that Noem lied in her upcoming book titled No Going Back about having a staring contest with North Korean authoritarian strongman Kim Jong Un. (An odd choice of world dictators to falsely belittle, since her desired boss Donald Trump has repeatedly praised the North Korean dictator, among others.) After Noem claimed not to know the lie was in the book she supposedly wrote (and for which she’s already recorded the audio version), Stephen Colbert suggested, “Thats why her book is now called Going Back and Making Some Changes.”

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