Late Night with Seth Meyers may be on a two-month long hiatus, but that isn’t stopping the show’s host from poking fun at U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada.
On the third episode of a video podcast series titled “A Closer Look: Out of Office”, Meyers sits down with the segment’s writer and producer, Sal Gentile, to discuss news they’ve missed, including what they dub this week’s biggest headline: the U.S.-Canada trade spat.
The episode, recorded on Aug. 25, covers the showdown before Trump’s executive order signing that attempts to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. Even so, Meyers had lots of thoughts on the ongoing trade dispute.
The late-night host described Trump’s decision to go to war with Canada as “one-sided lunacy.”
But he also noted Canada’s attitude shift to the U.S. president’s antics as of this week.
“Doesn’t it feel like this week there’s a real sense that everyone is just like, ‘We don’t care what you say anymore?’” he asked.
“No one has any reason to believe that there’s anything behind anything he says. Because nobody wants this,” Gentile added.
Meyers said Trump’s entire plan right now is unfolding as though “nothing has been thought even a half-step ahead.”
‘Dollar store Donald Trump’
Meyers and Gentile also joked about the “good cop-bad cop” dynamic going on in Canada between Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
“You have Mark Carney, who seems like a real reasonable fellow, right? Like never gets his dander up,” Meyers said.
”(Then you have) Ford, who looks like you basically told Claude ‘make a Canadian Donald Trump,’” Meyers continued, when Gentile pitched in another insult: “He looks like dollar store Donald Trump.”
The two joked about the threats Ford had made towards Canada’s southern neighbours, including when he told people to “throw everything in the kitchen sink … put massive pain on the U.S.” and when he dangled the threat of cutting off their electricity supply.
“Just a guy who looks like he’s gonna follow through. I don’t know if he will, but he looks like it,” Meyers said.
“I do think he’ll make a lot of appearances in ‘A Closer Look,’” Gentile said of Ford, referring to a segment that’s part of the show’s regular programming.
Meyers and Gentile bounced around while discussing Canada on their podcast, bringing up the “new character” that is U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and other recent comments Ford made about Trump, but both concluded the trade war was a “self-destructive” move made by the president.
