While we’ve long heard rumors that the Big Lie was born on Election Night 2020, when a tipsy Rudy Giuliani told Donald Trump to forget what the polls said and just declare himself president, the story is far less funny when it’s being told by Liz Cheney as part of the January 6th senate hearings. (But still really, really funny.) Seth Meyers couldn’t wait to talk about Giuliani being “wasted on Election Night” during Monday’s “A Closer Look” segment.
When Meyers heard Cheney say that Giuliani was “inebriated” on Election Night, he figured it was just a side note to detailing what was clearly a clusterf**k of an evening. “What I could have never imagined, in my wildest dreams,” he admitted, “was that it was just a tease for what was coming up. Because it turns out a significant portion of the hearing, bolstered by witness testimony, focused on former mayor Giuliani—an attorney to the President of the United States—being blitzed out of his f**king mind.”
While Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, went on record—albeit seemingly reluctantly—that, “The mayor was definitely intoxicated, but I do not know his level of intoxication when he spoke with the president,” other witnesses weren’t as forthcoming. Former campaign manager Bill Stepien explained that people didn’t want Giuliani talking to the president, and noted how following that night, Trump staffers were lumped into one of two groups: the batshit Big Liars who were following Trump and Giuliani’s lead and what he called “Team Normal.”
“It’s so funny to me how, in all these depositions, Trump aides are all hemming and hawing, pausing, and taking their time to use the most precise legal language possible, because they’re under oath” Meyers observed. “But then as soon as someone asks, ‘Was anyone drunk at the White House?,’ they all immediately buzz in like the over-eager uncle on Family Feud: ‘Rudy! It was Rudy!’ In fact, if ‘Who was drunk at the White House?’ was a question on Family Feud, the top five answers would all be the same.”
Meyers admitted that he would love to see more of these depositions, and find out how, exactly, these people surmised that Rudy was drunk—and hoping that “Well, I saw him holding an empty bottle of scotch and hitting on a portrait of Dolly Madison” might be one answer.
You can watch the full clip above, beginning around the 3:30 mark above.