After back-peddling Tuesday on his condemnation of white supremacy groups, President Trump was the subject of late-night show monologues Tuesday evening, as comedians again analyzed Trump’s response to the weekend violence in Charlottesville, Va.
Jimmy Kimmel proposed an idea — forget about president; let’s make Trump America’s first king.
“Think about it,” he said. “England has a queen. She lives in a palace. Everyone makes a big deal when she shows up. She has no power at all.”
The queen could misbehave absurdly, Kimmel said, but her behavior would not impact British politics. She could “open her shirt” on her balcony or “be completely bonkers” and “nothing over there would change.”
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“She’d still be queen, it would still be fine. That’s what we need to do with Donald Trump. We need to set him up in a castle, maybe in Florida, lead him to the top, and then lock the door to that castle, forever,” Kimmel said.
He leaves the audience with an alternate campaign motto: Make America Great Britain Again.
Before his proposal, Kimmel tries to empathize with Trump voters and their reasons for electing Trump in the first place.
“He talks tough. He wants to drain the swamp. Sometimes he can be funny. He rips into his opponents in a way politicians never do, have never done before,” he said. “And you thought, ‘You know what? This guy’s different, and that’s what I want. Different.’”
But then he proceeds to read a laundry list of things that he deems to be Trump’s craziest choices and actions thus far, aiming to persuade Trump voters and supporters to acknowledge they made a mistake with their presidential choice:
He demanded an investigation into voter fraud, despite having won the election.
He refuses to release his tax returns.
He got in a fight with the mayor of London hours after a terror attack there.
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He tweeted a typo — covfefe — in the middle of the night.
He hires and fires staff members, sometimes within a number of days.
“And that’s just some of the list. If I went through all of it, it would be longer than the menu at the Cheesecake Factory. It would be huge,” Kimmel said.
He added: “By every reasonable account, and I’m using his own words here, he is a total disaster. He screws up royally, every day, sometimes two or three times a day. We can’t keep up with it.”
Stephen Colbert had his own piece of advice for the president: Just choose a side, Nazis or Not Nazis.
“The president knew the right thing was to make a statement on Monday, be clear about who was to blame, and then move on to the people’s business,” Colbert said, pausing. “I’m just kidding. He held a press conference today in I believe the seventh circle of hell.”
Colbert plays highlights from Tuesday’s press conference for the audience, starting with Trump’s explanation that he waited two days to condemn the white supremacy groups who marched in Charlottesville, Va., because he needed all the facts.
“‘OK, I wait for the facts, OK,’” Colbert said, mimicing Trump. “‘Just ask the millions of illegal voters who refused to look for Obama’s birth certificate during my record-breaking inauguration, OK.’ ”
Colbert later takes a hit at Trump’s defense of certain protesters at the rally, emphasizing that not everyone there was a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist.
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There were two sides to the rally, Trump explains, and there was violence and wrong-doing on both sides.
Mimicking Trump again, Colbert said, “‘You know, one side hates minorities. The other side hates people who hate minorities. OK, two sides, alright. It’s just like D-Day, remember, D-Day. Two sides, Allies and the Nazis, there was a lot of violence on both sides, OK? Ruined a great beach and could have been a golf course.’”
And Seth Meyers did his own brief “Breaking Crazy” segment on the press conference in which he described Trump as a bad waitress in a diner trying to get fired to go to a concert.
Meyers replays a portion of the press conference in which Trump discusses taking down statues and rhetorically asks, “Where does it stop? Where does it stop? Buddy, we’ve been asking ourselves that question since January.”
Felicia Gans can be reached at felicia.gans@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @FeliciaGans.