Late Night Not Wowed by Trump's Social Media Bans

'Guess who doesn't want to ban TikTok anymore'
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 8, 2021 8:16 AM CST

Late night hosts had a lot to unpack Thursday, from Joe Biden's certification as the next US president to President Trump's bans from social media. "And yet, compared to yesterday, it's a slow news day," remarked Jimmy Fallon, who called out resigning White House officials. "Resigning with two weeks left feels less like some moral stand and more like leaving early to beat traffic," the Tonight Show host noted, per the New York Times. "It makes sense, though," quipped James Corden on the Late Late Show. "You want to get out into the job market before the Trump administration gets blocked on LinkedIn as well." More:

  • "People were comparing this big wave of resignations to rats fleeing the Titanic," Corden continued. "But I really don't think that's fair. At one point, the Titanic actually had some direction. It was going somewhere."
  • Late Show host Stephen Colbert took aim at the false claim, repeated by Rep. Matt Gaetz, that facial recognition was used to identify antifa members at the Capitol on Wednesday. "If you’re going to sell a-- covering fantasies that rioters weren’t really the president's supporters, you know what might help? If the president's supporters would stop bragging that they're the ones who rioted," he said.

  • Neither was Colbert impressed with Trump's Thursday address. "He doesn't mean a word of it. A man facing a noose will say anything to save his neck," he said, before joking that Trump would use the next two weeks to "send a pallet of meth and machetes to every Bass Pro Shop in the country with a note saying, 'Make me proud.'"
  • Seth Meyers said there was a risk of violence occurring again. "That's why people responsible for this should be held accountable from the top down." On Wednesday, "we learned that if you incite a coup against the US government, you will face up to 12 hours without a Twitter account," said the Late Night host. But those responsible "should be removed from the White House and expelled from Congress," he added, naming Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.
  • Several of the hosts took aim at Trump's indefinite ban from Facebook and Instagram, and temporary removal from Twitter. "Good to know Twitter is finally treating a violence-inciting fascist as harshly as a teenager who used seven seconds of an Imagine Dragons song," said Colbert. "In other news, guess who doesn't want to ban TikTok anymore," quipped Fallon.
(More late night host stories.)

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