Seth Meyers on Trump’s cabinet picks: ‘Billionaires are effectively running the government now’
Late-night hosts talked Donald Trump’s cabinet of billionaire donors and the House ethics committee stalemate over an investigation into Matt Gaetz.On Wednesday’s Late Night, Seth Meyers offered a dire pronouncement on the state of American politics.“Our political system is dominated by billionaires.Both sides are captive to wealthy interests,” he said.“It should be noted that Kamala Harris had plenty of billionaires’ support of her own.
But wealthy elites, including the richest man alive, played an especially unprecedented role in getting Trump elected.And he’s repaying them by putting them straight into his government.”Trump has already nominated numerous billionaires into his cabinet, including transition adviser and billionaire donor Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary; Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the new “Department of Government Efficiency”; and Linda McMahon will be secretary of education.“What does a former head of a wrestling league know about education?” Meyers wondered.“Oh no, are teachers gonna open class now making sweaty threats into a microphone?“So billionaires are effectively running the government now, and even the cabinet picks who aren’t billionaires themselves have billionaires backing them,” he explained.
On Tuesday, Musk took to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter that he now owns, to support Trump’s embattled pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz.He wrote: “Matt Gaetz has 3 critical assets that are needed for the AG role: a big brain, a spine of steel and an axe to grind.”“He’s got a big brain, he’s got a spine of steel and his eyes will be wide open because he can’t close them after all the Botox,” Meyers joked, referring to the Florida congressman’s apparent plastic surgery.“Also, if you’re the nation’s top law enforcement officer, you’re not supposed to have an axe to grind,” he added.“You wouldn’t go to a doctor whose wife left him for you.
“Musk and the other billionaires want to use government as a tool to crush their enemies, and they want to hollow out regulatory agencies because those agencies are the only constraints on their power,” he concluded.In Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel lamented how the House ethics committee reached an impasse on whether to release the report investigating Gaetz’s alleged sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, special favors to associates and obstruction of justice.“Basically, all the same stuff that won Trump the election this time,” Kimmel quipped.According to a report, the committee has records of 27 Venmo payments by Gaetz to two women for sex, totaling over $10,000.“If you have to worry about deleting your browser history and your Venmo transaction history every night, you probably shouldn’t be attorney general of the United States,” Kimmel mused.
“Every Republican on the House committee, every member of the ‘law and order’, ‘family values’ party, voted against releasing their findings,” he added.“Just like you do with any ethics report that completely exonerates someone.”Releasing the report would require “one Republican – only one – to vote with the Democratic members of the committee,” said Kimmel.“In a party full of Minions, we have to hope that one of them is a Stuart,” he continued, referring to the Despicable Me character.Trump is reportedly optimistic about Gaetz’s beleaguered nomination prospects.
“But if Gaetz wants enough votes to get confirmed in the Senate, he’s got a lot of work to do,” said Kimmel.“Not on his face – he’s already done too much on that.It looks like his forehead got Zamboni-ed or something.Maybe instead of attorney general, he could be our plastic surgeon general?”And on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert also looked into the House stalemate over how to handle the Gaetz investigation.The House ethics committee includes equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, so going into the vote over whether to release the report, “all the ethics committee needed was one Republican with ethics”, Colbert quipped.
In the end, all of the Republicans voted to protect Gaetz,“So the vote went along strict party lines,” said Colbert,“And when Gaetz heard the words ‘party lines’, he showed up with a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill,“What I want to know is: what the hell is it that they don’t want us to see?” he wondered,“Because the stuff we already know is so terrible that if Gaetz ever moves to a new neighborhood, he’s going to have to introduce himself door-to-door.
”Colbert recapped what we already know: that the lawyer representing two women testified that Gaetz paid more than $10,000 for sex, and that one saw him having sex with a 17-year-old, below the age of consent in Florida.The women also provided investigators with numerous photos of their time with Gaetz.In other news, “it’s a day that ends in a Y, so that means Donald Trump has made yet another cabinet pick that makes you go, ‘why?’” said Colbert.As of Wednesday, Trump’s new nominee for secretary of education is the former WWE CEO Linda McMahon.McMahon has no teaching background, “but you know what they say,” said Colbert.
“Those who can, do.Those who can’t, get a job in the Trump administration.”
Tesla’s path in China clears as Musk courts both Trump and Xi
Billionaire CEO is well connected in the US and China, something that could smooth the road ahead for the electric vehicle maker amid a looming tariff warIf it pays to have friends in high places, few among us can claim to be better placed than Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and one of the only people to have cosy relationships with both Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. His commercial and political connections to both may prove pivotal as the feud between the US and China plays out over the next four years, particularly as Trump promises steep tariffs.Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, once supported Joe Biden. But his relationship with the current US president soured over the past four years as, among other insults, Musk felt that the White House gave Telsa, his car and green energy company, “the cold shoulder”. Trump, meanwhile, has described Tesla as “incredible” even while pledging to do away with subsidies for electric vehicles
What does the US Department of Justice want Google to do?
The US Department of Justice has proposed a range of punchy remedies to address Google’s dominance of the internet search market, including the forced divestment of its Chrome browser.Google said the proposals represented a “radical interventionist agenda” that would harm America’s standing as a tech superpower.Big tech’s power, and whether and how it should be tamed, has become a political and regulatory talking point on both sides of the Atlantic. This will be one of the defining confrontations of that debate.The DoJ has asked a federal judge to consider several remedies after a ruling in August that found Google was operating an illegal monopoly in the search market
Deus in machina: Swiss church installs AI-powered Jesus
The small, unadorned church has long ranked as the oldest in the Swiss city of Lucerne. But Peter’s chapel has become synonymous with all that is new after it installed an artificial intelligence-powered Jesus capable of dialoguing in 100 different languages.“It was really an experiment,” said Marco Schmid, a theologian with the Peterskapelle church. “We wanted to see and understand how people react to an AI Jesus. What would they talk with him about? Would there be interest in talking to him? We’re probably pioneers in this
Elon Musk to ‘summon MPs to US to explain threats to American citizens’
Elon Musk has said UK MPs “will be summoned to the United States of America to explain their censorship and threats to American citizens” in a fresh escalation of tensions between the world’s richest man and Labour.Musk, who has been a fixture at the side of Donald Trump since his re-election as US president, was responding to a Guardian report on Wednesday that the Commons’ science and technology select committee would call him to give evidence in the new year in its inquiry into the spread of harmful content on social media after the August riots.The committee’s chair, Chi Onwurah, a Labour MP, said she wanted to see how Musk, who owns the X social media platform, “reconciles his promotion of freedom of expression with his promotion of pure disinformation”.X hosts accounts by figures including Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate, who were accused of inciting people to join Islamophobic protests.Musk, who has more than 205 million followers on X, responded by saying the MPs would be summoned to the US
Google must sell Chrome to end search monopoly, says US justice department
The US Department of Justice has proposed a far-reaching overhaul of Google’s structure and business practices, including the sale of its Chrome browser, in a bid to end its monopoly on internet search.The DoJ proposals follow a landmark court ruling in August in which a federal judge ruled that Google maintained an illegal monopoly over search services.The proposals filed to a Washington federal court include the forced sale of the Chrome browser and a five-year ban from entering the browser market; a block on paying third parties such as Apple to make Google the default search engine on their products; and divestment of the Android mobile operating system if the initial proposals do not work.The DoJ also said Google should give publishers and content creators the ability to block their data from being used to train its artificial intelligence models. It wants Google’s search index, a database of all the webpages it has crawled, to be available to rivals, along with search results
Apple Watch Series 10 review: thinner, lighter and basically the same
A larger screen and thinner body mark the biggest change to the Apple Watch in years, but you might have to squint to see it.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.That is because Apple has kept much the same design on the outside despite requiring significant changes on the inside to make the watch thinner and lighter
Spain’s floods force some UK sellers to buy oranges from southern hemisphere
Electric shock: carmakers battle strict UK electric car rules as big fines loom
Jeff Jarvis: ‘Elon Musk’s investment in Twitter seemed insane, but it gave him this power’
Wire cutters: how the world’s vital undersea data cables are being targeted
RFU accused of betraying game over Premiership promotion criteria
Warren Gatland will ‘let dust settle’ before deciding on his future