-Hello, everyone, and welcome to another
special social distancing episode of "Late Night."
As you can see from the backdrop behind me,
I have moved from my hallway to my private study
where I sit at night in a smoking jacket
with a glass of brandy pondering life's great mysteries.
It looks kind of like this.
Eureka. And as you can also see,
I own my very own "back in my day" sweater
that I wear unironically, so ya burnt! me.
And to be clear, this is definitely my private study
and not a garage I've been relegated to
because my family has told me on no uncertain terms
I'm not allowed to do my little political rants
at the dinner table.
Now, I hope you're all staying at home
self-distancing and doing your part to slow the spread,
despite the fact that our unhinged president
would like to ignore the crisis
and return to normal as soon as possible.
For more on this. It's time for "A Closer Look."
♪♪
Donald Trump sees everything as a transaction.
His first question is always, "What do I get out of this?"
It's what he asked when he was building casinos.
It's what he asked when they offered him "The Apprentice,"
and it's what he asked when Eric was born.
[ As Trump ] Great. What's in it for me?
[ Normal voice ] And even the doctor was like,
"Oh, literally nothing.
Nothing. This is a straight-up loss for you."
That's what happened when he got impeached, remember?
You remember that?
That huge world historical event
that happened approximately, I don't know, like 307 years ago.
Talking about the impeachment of Donald Trump feels like talking
about going to RadioShack to pick up a Walkman,
to listen to the new Tears for Fears album.
"Back in my day."
It was less than four months ago,
but it feels like it happened
right around the same time
Trump popped up in "Home Alone 2."
[ As Trump ] Yeah, I hope you find your parents, kid,
but first, you know where I can get some dirt on Joe Biden?
[ Normal voice ] It feels impossible to remember this now,
but the federal response to a deadly and highly infectious
global pandemic is being overseen by a president
who was impeached less than four months ago
for trying to use foreign aid to a war-torn country
to benefit himself politically.
As you may recall, immediately after the aid
came up on his phone call
with the newly elected president of Ukraine,
Trump literally said the words,
"I would like you to do us a favor, though."
And of course, Trump is the kind of guy
who asks you for a favor before he's even met you.
He's like a guy messaging a girl he just met on Tinder.
"Would love to meet you.
Can I crash at your place for a few days?
I have a fever and a cough.
And my roommate kicked me out for using their toothbrush.
Also, my roommate is my wife and I have five kids."
So everything with Trump is a transaction
in which he seeks to personally benefit himself,
whether it's foreign aid to a war-torn country
or a global pandemic.
For example, after he was criticized
by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for not sending
the state enough ventilators from the federal stockpile,
Trump lashed out by claiming it was a two-way street
and that governors had to earn help from the federal government
by being nice to him.
-We're building them hospitals.
We're building a medical centers.
And he was complaining about we're doing
probably more definitely more than anybody else.
But he shouldn't be talking about us.
He's supposed to be buying his own ventilators.
We're going to help. We're working very, very hard
for the people of New York. We're working along with him.
And then I watch him on the show complaining.
We are doing very well with, I think,
almost all of the governors for the most part.
I think we're doing very well.
But, you know, it's a two-way street.
They have to treat us well, also.
-No, they don't. It's your job.
They don't owe you anything for doing your job.
States don't pay tribute to the president.
[ As Trump ] What gifts have arrived for me today?
[ Normal voice ] Well, Mr. President,
Alaska sent timber. Maryland sent crabs.
[ As Trump ] And what of New York?
[ Normal voice ] They set the most magnificent creature, sir.
He is half-man, half-baseball.
[ As Trump ] How amusing. Yes. Yes.
Send them two ventilators in return.
[ Normal voice ] What makes you like this?
This guy is so insecure and self-obsessed,
he demands constant praise and validation
simply for doing the bare minimum.
And if he doesn't get it, he'll just thank himself in a tweet.
Imagine being America's dumbest person
somehow getting the highest office in the land
and still thinking you're owed something.
He's like a dog who expects a treat
every time you [bleep] in the yard.
When you let him back in the house,
he goes straight to the closet and sits there
until you toss him a McNugget.
In fact, The Daily Beast reported this week
that Trump views his response to the pandemic
purely through the lens of who's being nice to him.
And as a result of that,
he's been swinging wildly back and forth,
depending on what Cuomo says about him on any given day.
A person who spoken to the president earlier this month
recounted that one day, Trump had mentioned in a meeting
how well Cuomo was behaving in handling the crisis,
Only to two days later, start bashing the governor
in a different private conversation as "nasty."
There's no telling which Trump
you're going to get on any given day.
One day, he'll be your best friend.
The next day, he'll hate you.
It's like we're trapped in the movie "Fight Club."
One day, we're going to see Trump
kicking the crap out himself in the White House parking lot.
[ As Trump ] The first rule of fight club --
I get 20 percent of all bets.
[ Normal voice ] Also, I really, truly hate that Trump
uses the word "nasty" as an insult because it ruins
what could otherwise be a fun word.
Just once, I'd like to see him get up at the podium
and use it the way Raven-Symoné would use it.
[ As Trump ] Everyone remember, don't cough into your hands
'cause that's nasty!
[ Normal voice ] The president
is supposed to be a public trust.
You're supposed to be able to distinguish between
your own personal interests and the duties of the office.
Now, sure, every president gets something out of it.
Maybe they use it to meet girls or they get a nice Netflix deal.
They might even use it to score a sweet job in real estate.
95 years old and still building houses.
Jimmy Carter is the yin to Trump's yang.
It's like he has to do a good thing
for every bad thing Trump does.
One house at a time.
Every time Trump tweets, Jimmy says,
[ As Carter ] Better get my tool belt.
[ Normal voice ] So, yes, there are benefits to being president,
but Trump is taking it to an insane level.
He pathologically is incapable of grasping anything
other than his own survival. In fact, CNN reported this week
that Trump is considering reopening the country
prematurely in the middle of a deadly pandemic,
partially because he personally is bored inside the White House.
-I want to bring in CNN's Caitlin Collins
live for us from the White House.
Caitlin, sources tell you that the president
is feeling increasingly isolated at the White House
and questioning, eager to have life returned to normal.
-Yeah, he feels like he's been cut off from the outside world,
much like the rest of the nation and other parts of the world
feel as they are responding to this staying home.
-Hey, man, welcome to the club. We're all stuck inside.
Why don't you just do what we're all doing
and put on your sweatpants,
watch four episodes of "Tiger King,"
try to do an online workout, give up,
and just drink wine out of a cereal bowl until you pass out.
You're not the only one being inconvenienced.
Normally, I'd be doing my show from a well-lit studio
in midtown Manhattan for 200 people,
but instead, I'm here in my house
trying to get my dog to laugh at my jokes.
I got people on Twitter telling me I'm worse at YouTube videos
than their teenage daughters. Well, no [bleep]
I'm 46, which probably won't surprise you
now that you see what I look like
when I'm doing my own makeup.
Also, teenage girls are great at YouTube
and I know because I spent half the day
watching makeup tutorials
on how not to look like a ghost in a bookstore.
And do you know how hard it is to tell a 4-year-old
"Daddy has to go make one of his videos."
I mean, it's true, but it sounds like a lie.
It sounds like what you'd say
before going to the garage to drink alone.
[ Slurring ] I gave 'em hell today, buddy.
I gave 'em hell in my video.
[ Normal voice ] Yesterday, I had a take ruined
because a bird wouldn't shut up.
You know how bad things are when you're having bird troubles?
They're bad. So I'm sorry you're bored,
stuck in America's most famous house
that has its own personal chef in a bowling alley.
Boo-hoo.
In fact, CNN also reported
that Trump is so bored in the White House
he's actually been going to meetings
like everyone working from home.
Trump has shown evidence of cabin fever,
crashing meetings of his coronavirus task force,
inserting himself in planned press conferences
during daily policy sessions.
Aides say they sometimes don't know whether Trump
will walk through the door,
leading to a general level of uncertainty
on what to place on the agenda.
So the answer to the riddle,
"How do you get the president to go to a meeting?"
is a [bleep] pandemic.
But of course, he makes meetings worse.
It's amazing to think that if you want to do
the actual work of government in the Trump era,
you have to hide like a teenage boy with a copy of "Maxim."
[ Whispering ] So as you can see here,
maximizing testing capacity
is the most efficient way to flatten the curve --
Oh, crap! Someone's in here! Someone's in here!
[ Normal voice ] And there must be a huge difference
between having Trump in the meeting
and not having him in the meeting.
If he's not there, you can dive deep into the weeds
of public health and epidemiology.
If he's there, you have to rewrite the agenda
so the first item is --
"Coronavirus. Did Obama start it alone or did Hillary help?"
[ As Trump ] My personal take is it looks like a two-man job.
But you guys are the scientists. Okay.
I'm going to go give the Lincoln portrait
another shaving cream beard.
I'm gonna groom you, Lincoln!
[ Normal voice ] Also, it's really gotta suck
for everyone else in the White House
now that Trump is trapped inside and showing up to meetings.
it's like trying to work from home
while babysitting your kids.
Next time Mike Pence Skypes into a meeting,
Trump's gonna wander into the room behind him
in a baby walker.
Well, Trump apparently resented the implication
that he was bored while holed up in the White House
because yesterday he lashed out on Twitter,
writing "I hear that fake news CNN just reported
that I am isolated in the White House,
wondering out loud when life will return to normal.
Does anybody really believe that?
There was no leak. They made it up.
They are corrupt and fake news.
I've been packed all day with meetings.
I have no time for stupidity."
This is the age of coronavirus.
Being packed in meetings is stupidity.
[ As Trump ] So many meetings today.
Each one with more people.
Each one in a smaller room, sharing one pen.
[ Normal voice ] Stupidity is all you have time for.
You spend so much time on stupidity,
you literally got the country's
leading infectious disease expert,
the widely respected doctor
in charge of fighting a global pandemic
to touch his face in exasperation
during one of your inane press conferences.
That's how annoying you are.
You made the guy whose job it is
to tell people not to touch their faces, touch his face.
It's like getting a librarian to yell at you.
"Shut the [bleep] up!"
"Karen, I've never heard you raise your voice before."
"He just -- He broke me." "How?!"
"He just kept holding up 'Moby Dick' and asking me..."
[ As Trump ] Do you get it?
But do you?
[ Normal voice ] Nonetheless, it's clearly the case that Trump
is desperate to prematurely stop the fight
against the coronavirus pandemic
in order to appease the stock market,
because when the green arrow goes up,
all the business schools around him tell him how great he is.
And that's what he lives for.
If someone could just show him the chart of coronavirus cases
in the U.S. and tell him it's the Dow Jones...
[ As Trump ] We did it, you guys.
High five, high five. What? Why not?
Oh, right, right. The Sharona virus.
From the meeting.
[ Normal voice ] Trump doesn't care for a minute
that the outbreak is accelerating,
growing deadlier by the day.
Nurses and doctors on the front lines
have compared hospitals to war zones
and called the situation apocalyptic.
And yet on Wednesday, Trump suggests the media
was trying to force him to keep public health restrictions
in place to hurt him politically.
-Let me put the tweet up. "The lamestream media
is the dominant force in trying to get me
to keep our country closed as long as possible in the hope
that it will be detrimental to my election success.
The real people want to get back to work ASAP.
We will be stronger than ever before.
-You think this is all a big conspiracy
to hurt your re-election chances? You know what?
If you think it's all a conspiracy, then why don't you
go outside and ask a bunch of people to cough on you.
Just go out onto the streets of D.C. with a mic
and give people a dollar to cough on you.
You can call it "Bully on the Street."
This is a truly dangerous moment to have a paranoid narcissist
who's incapable of grasping anything
other than his own self-interest
in charge of the federal government.
In fact, yesterday, as the outbreak was only accelerating
and healthcare professionals were begging for supplies,
the president decided it was a good time to pat himself
on the back and pick fights with multiple reporters.
-You said that the media wants the country to remained closed.
-Yeah, yeah, no, the media would like to
see me do poorly in the election.
I think -- I think --
-Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have said that
reopening the country by Easter is not a good idea.
What is that plan based on?
-Just so you understand. Are you ready?
-Mm-hmm. -I think there are certain
people that would like it not to open so quickly.
I think there are certain people that would like it
to do financially poorly because they think
that would be very good as far as defeating me at the polls.
I think it's very clear that there are people
in your profession that write fake news.
You do. She does.
There are people in your profession that write fake news.
We've done one hell of a job.
Nobody's done the job that we've done.
And it's lucky that you have this group here
right now for this problem.
Well, you would even have a country left.
-I'm sorry, but why the hell
are we still airing these things?
He's not saying anything valuable.
He's just calling out reporters one by one,
like an insult comic at [bleep] night club.
[ As Trump ] Women love to shop.
This lady knows what I'm talking about.
Also, she nasty!
[ Normal voice ] We wouldn't have a country left?
I don't know if you've been outside lately,
but we can't even go outside lately.
Thanks to you, we barely have a country left.
We have pieces of a country.
Trump's like the house sitter you hire
who throws a party at your place while you're gone
and when you get back, hands you a plastic bag
full of pieces of an expensive vase.
"All the pieces are there. You just, uh --
You need to glue New Jersey back on to Pennsylvania.
And on top of the fact that we have a president
lying about a public health crisis
and spreading dangerous misinformation,
some in the Republican Party also tried to use the crisis
to punish working Americans.
A group of GOP senators
objected to a provision in the stimulus bill
that gives workers $600 extra
on top of their usual unemployment benefits
and introduced an amendment last night to strip that out,
claiming it would incentivize people to go on unemployment
rather than go back to work.
-The moment we can go back to work,
we cannot create an incentive for people to say,
"I don't need to come back to work
because I can do better someplace else."
So we cannot be paying people more money on unemployment
than what they would get paid in their job.
-We cannot encourage people to make more money
in unemployment than they do in employment.
If you're a nurse aide making
$15 or $16 an hour, you're on the front lines here.
So you gonna have all these well-trained nurses.
They're going to make $24 an hour on unemployment.
You're literally incentivizing
taking people out of the workforce.
-I'm sorry, you think nurses who are on the front lines
of a pandemic are suddenly going to quit their jobs
because they could get an extra 600 bucks?
Dude, you're telling on yourself.
All that does is reveal you care more about money than your job.
[ As Graham ] If someone offered me 600 bucks,
I'd quit my job and spend my days
sitting on my porch in my rocker, drinking a mint julep
in a big straw hat and gossiping with my dog Biscuit.
You didn't hear it from me, Biscuit,
but Miss Beauregard cat is only pretending to be spayed.
She's hoping to get knocked up by one of those wealthy cats
who live at the country club. [ Slurping ]
[ Normal voice ] So in response to that, Senator Bernie Sanders
took to the floor of the Senate last night
to fight for the expanded unemployment benefits
in a fiery speech that he did not hold back.
-And now I find that some of my Republican colleagues
are very distressed. They're very upset of somebody
who's making 10, 12 bucks an hour
might end up with a paycheck for four months
more than they received last week.
[ Sarcastically ] Oh, my God, the universe is collapsing!
Imagine that -- somebody was making 12 bucks an hour.
Now, like the rest of us, faces an unprecedented economic crisis
with the 600 bucks on top of their normal,
their regular unemployment check
might be making a few bucks more for four months.
[ Sarcastically ] Oh, my word! Will the universe survive?!
-Man, I love -- I love sarcastic Bernie.
It's so refreshing to see a politician
who's as pissed off as everyone else is right now.
He lit into those Republicans like his bratty grandchildren
were complaining they couldn't
look at their phones at the dinner table.
[ As Sanders ] Oh, oh, my God! The universe is collapsing!
How will I survive without my Tiks and my Toks?
You know, when I was young, we didn't have emojis.
We just had to make faces ourselves like this.
Now, you know I'm surprised.
[ Normal voice ] The president is a threat to public health.
He's incapable of distinguishing
between his own personal interests
and the duties of his office,
and he uses his daily platform on national TV
to spread misinformation and air petty grievances.
No one watching these press conferences
actually learns anything.
In fact, if you watch Trump talk for any amount of time,
you end up asking yourself sincerely...
[ Sarcastically ] Oh, my word! Will the universe survive?!
-This has been "A Closer Look."
♪♪
-Stay safe. Wash your hands. We love you.