Donald Trump and his pals have concocted a lot of wild conspiracy theories in their time. But on Monday night’s show, Seth Meyers laid out what might be one of the GOP’s most bizarre, and bizarrely specific, ideas yet: that Italy deployed military technologies to tamper with America’s voting machines from across the Atlantic Ocean to change votes for Trump to votes for Joe Biden.
As Meyers explained, this was one of apparently many theories Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, pushed the Department of Justice to investigate in the final weeks of Trump’s presidency. In a clip from MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski quoted an article in The New York Times which described the idea as “a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States and switch votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.”
Meyers spoke for pretty much all sane people when he basically said what everyone was thinking already: Italy?!?
“For one thing, have you ever been to Italy? If you asked them to tamper with an election in November they might get around to it by March… Seriously, these insane GOP conspiracy theories are starting to sound like election truth or Mad Libs. In Arizona, they’re looking for bamboo in the ballots because they think they were smuggled in from China. And now we find out the former chief of staff thought the election was stolen by Italian satellites. In fact, this insane theory got so far in the White House that according to the Times, ‘An email to another Justice Department official indicated that Mr. Rosen had refused to broker a meeting between the FBI and a man who had posted videos online promoting the Italy conspiracy theory, known as Italygate.”
While Meyers found a lot to laugh about, he did say that Democrats “must take stock of the fact that this is the Republican party they’re dealing with. A Republican party whose most powerful figures are disseminating insane conspiracy theories about the election, calling for coups, trying to use the levers of power to subvert elections, and whose functionaries are trying to weaponize those lies as we speak by turning them into voter suppression laws.” He also imagines that at least a few people are pronouncing coup as “coop,” and—yep, that sounds about right.
You can watch the full segment above, starting around the 7:15 mark.
