Seth Meyers Touts the “Closest F***ing Look We’ve Ever Taken” in Primetime Special Following Debate
Seth Meyers touted the “Closest Fucking Look We’ve Ever Taken in Our Motherfucking Lives” on Wednesday night, as the Late Night segment moved to primetime and went deep on Tuesday’s presidential debate.
Tuesday’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump drew a substantially larger audience than the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, with many arguing Harris performed far better than Trump.
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Meyers began his analysis with a segment on conservative pundits’ attempt to spin the former president’s lackluster performance, citing one clip arguing that at least Trump’s opening and closing statements left great impressions.
“If you only watch those two parts, the first impression and last impression, you might leave without impression that he did all right,” the commentator said.
“That’s a good point, that’s a very good point,” Meyers said. “If there was anyone who watched a debate that way, yes, if you tuned in at 9, fell asleep at 9:03, then woke up 89 minutes later, you might think: ‘Hey, Trump did OK!'”
Meyers’ full “A Closer Look” monologue, which typically runs about 12 minutes at the top of a Late Night episode, lasted about 40 minutes in total during the primetime show, which was recorded live.
The Late Night host also touched on Trump’s former assertion that he would agree to multiple debates with Harris, from which the former president appeared to reverse course Tuesday as the debate ended.
“Because the first one was a disaster, and the second one would be super entertaining,” Meyers said, before playing a clip of Harris’ victorious speech following her performance. “She’s got the vibe of a mom who’s giving a toast after two glasses of wine at a wedding.”
Later, he showed a clip of Trump claiming improbably high approval ratings, and quipped that the former president was pulling the numbers from his Approval Statistics System, or ASS.
“I love the idea that Trump thinks he can fix a terrible debate performance by walking into the spin 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’s conclusion Tuesday. Meyers played a clip of Tim Walz learning of the endorsement on live television.
“That is the face of a man who just realized he’s one step closer to getting Taylor Swift tickets,” Meyers said. “He’s beaming. He looks like he just found out there’s a sale on gutters at Menards and 10 percent off leaf blowers.”
After a commercial break, Meyers touched on the debate’s relevance with a self-reference to his primetime slot.
“I don’t have to tell you the stakes of this debate could not have been any higher,” Meyers said. “I got bumped from 12:30 to 10. If you see me on your TV before you’re in your pajamas, it’s an emergency.”
Later in the monologue, Meyers also spoke about Trump’s viral comments regarding people eating cats and dogs in Ohio. When debate host David Muir pushed back against Trump’s claims, the former president responded: “There’s people on television saying my dog was taken and used for food.”
“If you don’t want to look like a crazy old man, there’s no worse phrase for you to bust out than, ‘The people on the television said it,'” Meyers said.
He continued, “Trump was fact-checked multiple times last night, and Harris wasn’t fact-checked at all. And yes, there are absolutely things you can quibble with from Harris, but it’s one thing to fact-check someone on the granular nature of their position on fracking. It’s another to say ‘No, people aren’t eating dogs.'”
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