Donald Trump’s transition team has been keeping busy — what with the official nomination of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson for secretary of state, and the reported selections of Carly Fiorina and Rick Perry for the national intelligence director and energy secretary posts, respectively. The president-elect’s potential White House administration is shaping up rather quickly, and as many news commentators and pundits have already pointed out, diversity isn’t its strong suit. Nor is living anywhere near the legal poverty line, which Late Night host Seth Meyers criticized in his “A Closer Look” segment on Tuesday.
“As a candidate, Donald Trump cast himself as a champion of the working class who would take on Wall Street and fix a rigged system. Even going so far as to claim he personally did not get along with rich people,” said Meyers in what could have easily been an implied nod at Trump’s recent Carrier deal fiasco. “Trump says he doesn’t get along with the rich and won’t cozy up to special interests. So who did he pick for secretary of state?”
As stated above, Trump’s pick for America’s top diplomat is Tillerson — the multimillionaire CEO of an oil and gas industry leader with uncomfortably close ties to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. Or as Meyers joked, “I guess when they drained that swamp there was oil at the bottom!”
Throughout the rest of the nearly nine-minute bit, Meyers and the Late Night writers blast through Trump’s announced (and rumored) cabinet picks and their many, many ties to financial and political wealth. That, and a reconsideration of Trump’s own impersonation of himself from rallies past, in which he touted his supposed inability to associate with the super rich. Meyers was especially impressed by the impression’s likeness to “a hungry Grimace, but for money” — a completely appropriate point considering the president-elect’s fondness for McDonald’s.