-As they start to worry about their midterm prospects,
Republicans are turning to their favorite election-year
scare tactic by lying about immigration,
highlighted by an especially cruel and sadistic stunt
from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis,
who claimed credit for his scheme
to lie to a group of undocumented migrants
and lure them onto a plane that then dropped them off
on a remote island where they didn't know anyone.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
[ Cheers and applause ]
An ironclad rule of modern
Republican politics in the Trump era
is that in order to thrive within the party,
you must have an unquenchable thirst for embarrassment.
You have to be a glutton for shame.
You have to be willing to debase yourself
and endure any indignity or humiliation
thrown your way by Donald Trump.
That's the one thing his cult-like inner circle
of criminal mutant gargoyles all have in common.
There's just no amount of [bleep] they won't eat
just to get invited to Trump's haunted golf mansion
for the honor of a photo op
with a man whose thumbs-up looks so unnatural,
you wouldn't be surprised if they had to lift it
into position using an elaborate system of pulleys and levers.
"Is it time for the picture? Let's get cranking, Eric!"
"Yes, father, yes!"
[ Laughter ]
"Faster, Eric. I don't have all day."
[ Laughter ]
"We're losing the light, Eric!"
[ Laughter ]
Ted Cruz threw his own family under the bus for Trump.
Matt Gaetz reportedly asked him for a pardon
in a sex-trafficking case.
And Rudy Giuliani did a press conference
outside a landscaping company
near a crematorium and a sex shop.
And you should have seen his face
when he accidentally walked into the sex shop.
"Whoa! These are some very odd-looking microphones."
[ Laughter ]
Now, of course, we could've Photoshopped this Rudy picture
screaming into a dildo microphone,
but it wasn't fair, so we didn't do it.
I mean, you can picture what it would've looked like,
but that's on you.
[ Laughter ]
We didn't do it.
[ Laughter ]
And now the most vivid example of humiliating obsequiousness
to Trump is Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance,
a Yale Law School graduate
and Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
Vance was once a relentless critic of Trump.
He called himself a "Never Trump guy"
who said he couldn't stomach Trump, called Trump noxious
and an idiot, even suggested Trump could be America's Hitler.
Hell, Vance could've been one of my writers.
In fact, he even came on this show
and talked to me, a cosmopolitan,
coastal elite, no less, when he was hawking his book.
And no one who has nice things to say
about Donald Trump comes on this show.
I mean, except for that one time
we did day drinking with Mike Lindell.
[ Laughter ]
You know, it's funny, because his normal voice
is drunk guy at a bar
telling you how much he loves you,
but his drunk voice -- it's so weird --
is British gentlemen.
"I have proof that Hugo Chavez
hacked the Dominion voting machines.
Now let's do some shots and head over
to Makato Hardee's.
[ Laughter ]
But now Vance has cynically retracted everything he said
about Trump to run for Senate. And Trump has repaid
Vance's newfound loyalty by both endorsing him
and also repeatedly humiliating him.
At a rally a few months ago,
Trump forgot Vance's name and then confused him
with one of Vance's primary opponents,
first calling him J.P. and then J.D. Mandel.
And then over the weekend, Trump appeared at another rally
with Vance and again took the opportunity to make
Vance eat [bleep] for his own entertainment.
"The New York Times" did a fake story today --
big front page -- that J.D. wasn't sure
if he wanted my support.
J.D. is kissing my ass he wants my support so --
Yeah, he said some bad things about me,
but that was before he knew me, and then he fell in love.
"J.D. is a great guy. Great guy.
Used to hate my guts,
but then he realized he couldn't win without me.
So he changed his tune in order to court my voters,
who he sees as gullible rubes.
That's you. You're the rubes."
[ Laughter ]
And it's not just Trump they've devoted themselves to
but Trumpism. For example, when Vance
took the podium at this rally on Saturday
and began to list the various problems
he would address as a senator from Ohio,
the first thing he could apparently think of
was actually 1,500 miles away from where he was speaking.
-We have got some problems right now, ladies and gentlemen.
We've got some problems on the southern border.
-The southern border of Ohio?
[ Laughter ]
You guys have a lot of problem with refugees
from Kentucky streaming across your border?
"You don't understand. That place is dystopian.
Hell, we live under the thumb of a ruthless dictator.
He calls himself the Colonel."
[ Laughter ]
No one's number-one problem is that far away,
unless they're being catfished as part of a fake
long-distance relationship.
"Yeah, I met this girl, Jessica, who lives in Vancouver.
She's so great. But, you know, it has --
It has been a drain financially.
I've been sending her money for a surgery to have her
Getty watermark removed."
[ Laughter ]
It's one thing to say we should fix the immigration system,
but Republicans are singularly
and obsessively focused on the border.
For example, there's this anecdote from 2018
that I'll never forget, when Trump was obsessively
hyping up the so-called caravans
of migrants supposedly headed for the border.
And "The New York Times" reported that
"Trump's dystopian imagery has clearly left an impression,
with some, including a 75-year-old Republican
in northern Minnesota, who said she was afraid
that migrant gangs could take over people's summer lake homes
in the state. 'What's to stop them?
We have a lot of people who live on lakes in the summer
and winter someplace else.
When they come back in the spring,
their house would be occupied.'"
Yeah. I mean, what is to stop them?
They could just waltz right over the border into El Paso,
hop on a Greyhound bus, ride that for three days,
break into a cabin on a frozen lake
in northern Minnesota, and catch Viking fever.
[ Laughter ]
I'll say if you live in Minnesota
and leave your house unoccupied for the winter,
you're much more likely to come back
and find Mike Lindell living there.
I mean... [ Laughter ]
...he needs a place to hibernate for the winter,
just like, you know, da bears. But that's...
[ Laughter ]
...how you know things are not going well for the GOP
when they bust out the caravans
and start hyperventilating about the border.
That's a sure sign of their political fortunes in any poll.
That's what Trump did in 2018. Didn't work.
But now they're doubling down and trying it again.
In fact, at that very same rally,
Trump actually took credit
for inventing the word "caravan."
-What's the problem? I said,
"Well, you won't take these horrible convicts
and other people that you released
into our country illegally, and you put them in caravans."
I came up with that term, by the way.
That was my term, like "fake news"
and lots of other terms we came up with.
"Crooked Hillary."
We came up with "Crooked Hillary."
We came up with a lot of...
He's like Billy Joel, stopping in the middle of an MSG set
and saying, "You know, I came up with Piano Man.
Yeah, before me, people had to say penis,
but nobody liked it 'cause it reminded them of ding dongs.
Also, Italian restaurant. That was one of mine.
Before, it was ristorante.
What do you guys want next?
What do you guys want to hear next?
"Big Shot"? I don't care. I get paid either way.
The problem for Trump and his gang
is that they've already tried this and failed.
Everyone is onto them, which is now
why they're trying to out-MAGA themselves
with increasingly ghoulish
and despicable acts of cruelty
toward migrants fleeing poverty and violence.
Which brings us to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis --
you know, grown-up Nelson Muntz --
and his grotesque scheme
to apparently lure migrants from Texas onto a plane
so he could drop them off on Martha's Vineyard
without telling them or anyone else,
a stunt designed entirely to curry favor with Fox News,
who he apparently alerted beforehand.
You see, they thought the people who live
on Martha's Vineyard would freak out.
Instead, residents and community organizations
scrambled without any notice
to provide aid and comfort to the migrants.
-Tonight, the community of Martha's Vineyard
coming together to provide food and shelter
to 48 undocumented migrants, women, men, and children
who landed on the wealthy island Wednesday.
So this entire thing was funded by Florida.
The flights were part of the state's program
to transport undocumented migrants
to so-called sanctuary cities.
Now, earlier this year, Florida lawmakers,
they had set aside $12 million for this transport program.
Looks like they're starting to use it.
-And the $12 million, I guess, is coming from the federal money
that came in for coronavirus.
-So congrats, Florida.
You just spent a bunch of taxpayer money
on a stupid and repulsive stunt that achieved nothing
except maybe some publicity for Ron DeSantis's
2024 presidential bid.
And worse than that, you gave the rich liberals
who summer on Martha's Vineyard,
another thing to feel self-righteous about.
[ Laughter ]
"When I heard those poor migrants had arrived,
I put on my Birkenstocks
and loaded my Tesla with sandwiches and pitched in.
I'm not saying I'm better than you, I'm proving it."
[ Laughter ]
Also, not to let you too inside on how summer vacations work,
but most of the liberals you hate left the vineyard
two weeks ago. And I should know.
I'm one of them. [ Laughter ]
That's right. I go to the Vineyard.
And you know where I was during President Obama's
star-studded Martha's Vineyard birthday party last summer?
Having dinner with my in-laws 'cause I wasn't invited.
[ Laughter ]
And not for lack of trying, it should be noted.
But it's also important to make a distinction
between the people who spend their summers on the island
and people who live there year round,
like the hardworking staff
at Martha's Vineyard Community Services
who rose to the occasion with grace and empathy.
Personally, I feel like DeSantis could've put the money he spent
on this stunt to better use in Florida
like their local community service organizations.
Or, I don't know, more traffic cops
to chase down seniors doing 80 on the highway
in their golf carts. Have you ever been down there?
Those people drive their golf carts
like they're [bleep] Maseratis.
One time, I pulled up to a light,
and an 85-year-old grandpa in golf khakis
challenged me to a street race.
Even their attempts to dunk on Massachusetts residents failed.
Like when Ted Cruz tweeted the quote,
Dems had activated the National Guard
to interdict migrants in Massachusetts
before it was pointed out to him
that the governor of Massachusetts
is a Republican named Charlie Baker,
who called up the guard to provide temporary shelter
and humanitarian resources to the migrants
on Joint Base Cape Cod.
It was such an embarrassing mistake,
Cruz had to delete the tweet.
And then, to make sure the tweet was fully deleted,
he said he had to find the server
where all the tweets are stored and go there in person
to physically remove the disk from the hard drive,
a hard drive he claimed was in Cancun.
I don't know. [ Laughter ]
Seems weird to me, but...
I mean, he's a senator. You got to trust him.
Now, on top of the many ways
in which this stunt was ghoulish and cruel,
NPR reported that the migrants were also
apparently lured onto the plane under false pretenses
and told they were headed to Boston,
where they would get expedited work papers.
Not to mention the fact that when they were dropped off
on a remote island far away from their court appointments
where they don't know anyone, in an especially cruel twist,
they were intentionally given only the most
rudimentary information about where they were headed.
-Accounts from the migrants who arrived last night
make it clear that they were lied to again and again
and fraudulently induced to board the planes.
They were told there was a surprise present for them
and that there would be jobs
and housing awaiting for them when they arrived.
This was obviously a sadistic lie.
They also very intentionally chose not to call ahead
to any single office authority on Martha's Vineyard
so that even the most basic human-needs arrangements
could be made.
Ensuring that no help awaited the migrants at all
was the entire point.
They were provided with a cartoonishly simple map
of Martha's Vineyard and the United States.
-I dare you to give that map and nothing else to Donald Trump
and let him find his way around Martha's Vineyard.
[ Laughter ]
I guarantee you he'd end up in Nantucket Sound
within half an hour, begging a dolphin
to give him a ride to Mar-A-Lago.
"Click, click, whistle, click, whistle.
Excuse me, excuse me. Click, click.
Excuse me. Click.
Click, whistle. Whistle, click.
Caravan. I came up with that one."
[ Laughter ]
"Click, whistle."
The Republican Party is an institution
built almost entirely
around spectacles of cruelty and humiliation.
And that's how you know they're desperate.
They're resorting to horrific scare tactics
and grotesque stunts in an effort to gin up
yet another election-year panic about the border.
And by his own admission,
Trump just pulls this stuff straight out...
-My ass. [ Laughter ]
-This has been "A Closer Look."
♪♪
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