Seth Meyers’s Address To President Trump On Late Night Might Be The Highlight Of His Career
· Thought Catalog
Updated 11 hours ago, November 4, 2025
“A Closer Look” is a fixture of Late Night with Seth Meyers and one of the most popular late-night segments that regularly haunt YouTube. There’s a certain formula to its success: Meyers often opens with a bait-and-switch joke, then launches into a diatribe against the most flagrant absurdities of the current administration, offering exasperated reactions to recent news clips while delivering a hilariously sleazy impression of the President. His fury and disbelief is clear even as he tosses out expertly calibrated, multi-layered jokes about our new collective hell; then he tops it all off with a perfectly-timed news clip that completes the segment.
I must admit: “A Closer Look” has become one of the few palatable ways in which I can ingest today’s news. Sure, it’s not a traditional form of journalism, and it’s clearly biased against the current administration; however, the research that goes into it is obvious, and I’m far too gone to adopt a charitable attitude towards any corruption in our country. “A Closer Look” was an extremely effective form of therapy for me during the 45th presidential administration, and it continues to pull me back from the edge during this latest exciting chapter in American history.
But on Monday, November 4, Meyers may have gifted us his best “A Closer Look” segment yet.
It starts out as business as usual. Meyers and his writers dig their claws into Trump’s new “tone-deaf” bathroom renovation, which the latter publicized on Truth Social via 25 photos across six posts in one day, even as millions of Americans were poised to lose access to federally-funded food stamps during our current government shutdown. Naturally, a 25-photo social media post is already cause for concern, as we all collectively stopped doing that in 2009 when millennials started rediscovering their freshman orientation week photo uploads thanks to the “On This Day” feature. It may have been called something else back then, but no living millennial actually remembers the name, since we are now breaching 40 and thus, in the eyes of Gen Z, have dementia.
But then Meyers moves on past Trump’s bathroom reno and its obligatory gold trashcan, and begins to address Trump directly. This is already a breach of protocol, as Meyers typically speaks of Trump in the third person, as if he’s an annoying minor relative.
“Now, the president jeopardizing food assistance for tens of millions of Americans matters,” Meyers says, before adding: “What matters far less is when the president posts about me, which he did over the weekend saying, among other things, that I may be the ‘least talented person to perform live in the history of television,’ calling me a ‘deranged lunatic,’ and commenting that I ‘talked endlessly about electric catapults on aircraft carriers.’” He is, of course, referencing Trump’s plaintive Truth Social post in which the President decries Meyers’ frequent takedowns of his administration.
“And look, in general,” Meyers goes on, “I try to live by the New Yorker’s creed: when someone is ranting and raving about you … Ignore them. Chances are they’re just going to move on and rant about something else.”
(Can confirm. The last time I visited New York, I accidentally made eye contact with a methed up woman on 31st Street who told me that I’d do well in jail. I accepted the compliment and continued to buy cookies.)
But then Meyers goes for the jugular.
“There is one thing that I simply have to address,” he says. “You can say I’m untalented, you can say I’m deranged, but I’m not the one who talks endlessly about catapults on aircraft carriers. You’re the one who talks endlessly about catapults on aircraft carriers.”
“A Closer Look” then proceeds to air a minute-long montage of clips in which the President endlessly discusses catapults, and sometimes “catapurts,” across a range of time spanning six years. In these clips, Trump is repeating an untrue assertion about catapult systems on Navy vessels, but does that part really matter?
The beauty of what follows is Meyers’ bold, unbridled address to Trump, who is possibly watching the segment from his new gold toilet.
“Until you said something,” asserts Meyers, “I didn’t even know aircraft carriers had catapults. I’m not the ‘Talk About Catapult Guy.’ Just ask my friends.”
A momentary pause, then: “Oh, uh, friends are… how would I describe this to you … OK, so they’re, like, people who enjoy spending time with you independent of financial and legal favors you can grant them.”
It’s one of the sickest Trump burns to ever grace Meyers’ show, and not just because it quite possibly provoked one of Trump’s deepest, most poisonous insecurities while the man was in the middle of a dump. It’s also one of the most bald-faced direct reproaches of the President on late-night TV, even while suggesting ever so unsubtly that America is morphing into an autocracy.
Ultimately, Meyers ties up the segment with a resounding statement that will likely haunt many of my nights to come. “I say this with sincerity, I don’t want to talk about catapults,” he concludes. “I don’t want to talk about bathrooms. And I’m realizing that I’m starting to sound like a deranged lunatic. That’s what you do to us, you make us talk about what you’re talking about and then we all sound crazy.”
It’s true, I just spent an article talking about Facebook photo dumps from 2009 and my capacity to attract a prison daddy in jail … all because of the President. Would I have still done this if the President hadn’t spoken about catapults several dozen times between 2019 and 2025? Since ya’ll don’t know me, I’m going to say that I doubt it!
Regardless, Meyers’ segment will go down as one of his best, if not his indisputably best, “A Closer Look” of all time. Just his one final thought should win the man an Emmy. Many Americans are slowly losing their minds, and it is all because of catapults.