Seth Meyers Tackles Trump, Weinstein and ‘Toxic Culture of Male Entitlement’ in ‘Late Night’ Rant: Watch
Seth Meyers took on Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein and “systemic misogyny” on Late Night Thursday.
Barely containing his disgust, Meyers’ A Closer Look segment focused on the bullying, silencing and coercing those powerful men like Weinstein and Trump engage in as well as the “toxic culture of male entitlement.”
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The host first took on the Trump, positing that “[we] have a president who built his political career almost entirely on bullying — his campaign and now his presidency has in many ways been a performance of dominance, a performance that in many cases has been explicitly misogynous,” he explained, citing the example of Trump’s behavior towards the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, who Trump called “not a capable person.”
“I’m sorry, she’s not a capable person?” Meyers asks. “What did you do after the hurricane?” Meyers says of Trump. “You took a week to send FEMA, you reminded them about their debts, and then you showed up two weeks after that and shucked paper towels like a teenager at the break room at Costco.”
Meyers then takes it one step further. “This is what male entitlement looks like,” he says. “A woman of color literally wading through floodwaters to help her constituents, being attacked by a powerful man so incompetent, he probably floods his own bathroom because he forgets to turn the faucet off.”
Seguing into his take-down of Harvey Weinstein — who was ousted from The Weinstein Co. earlier this week after separate reports from the New York Times and The New Yorker broke, detailing claims of sexual harassment and rape against him, prompting several more women to come forward — Meyers said, “Donald Trump is perhaps the most famous example of this kind of abuse of male power, but he is by no means the only one.”
Referring to Weinstein, Meyers continued, “This entire ordeal is yet another window into the entitled mind of powerful, predatory men who are used to operating without consequence. Weinstein thought he could escape the fallout of the allegations against him as he did for so many years, even though those accusations were horrifying.”
Meyers also condemned Weinstein and his team’s initial response to the allegations, in particular, former adviser Lisa Bloom’s comments that Weinstein was just “an old dinosaur learning new ways.”
“Dinosaurs don’t learn new ways, they go extinct,” Meyers says to applause from the audience. “They didn’t survive because they learned to type. If you’re a dinosaur, then this is your Ice Age, buddy, and unlike real dinosaurs, no one is ever going to try and bring back Harvey Weinstein.”
Watch the clip below.
This article originally appeared in THR.com.
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