It was inevitable. Late-night hosts wasted no time cooking up material about Donald Trump‘s presidency just days after his swearing-in ceremony. Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah all poked fun at Trump’s senior counselor Kellyanne Conway‘s “alternative facts” remark on Monday, January 23.
As previously reported, press secretary Sean Spicer falsely claimed during his very first press conference post-inauguration that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” In an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, Conway tried to defend Spicer’s remarks by calling them “alternative facts.” Todd, however, interjected and said that Spicer’s comments were “falsehoods.”
Kimmel, 49, for his part, shared “alternative facts” about himself to his audience. “At the Olympics this summer, I beat Usain Bolt to win a gold medal in the 100-meter dash. I am the fastest man alive, and I have the medal to prove it. It’s true-ish,” he joked. “I would like to thank each of the 1.3 million people in this room tonight for helping us set a record for the largest talk audience ever assembled. Thank you for believing in me.”
Meyers, 43, meanwhile, called out Spicer for brazenly lying “to the entire press core by disputing what everyone saw with their own eyes” and reaired Conway’s “alternative facts” footage.
“Kellyanne Conway is like someone trying to do the Jedi mind trick after only a week of Jedi training,” Meyers teased. “These may seem like small lies, but the small lies inoculate us against bigger lies. They make facts a part of partisan debate rather than accepted shared reality.”
Noah, 32, was the next to skewer Conway — and he didn’t hold back. “I like that she can taste the bulls—t in her mouth,” he said on The Daily Show. “You can tell she’s lying because right after she says it, she tries to casually flip her hair afterwards like she’s all chill.”
