Late-night host Seth Meyers dropped a video clip of Donald Trump rambling about highway medians, calling it the clearest sign yet of the president’s cognitive decline — and capping it with a punchline about first lady Melania Trump that left his audience in stitches.
“But there was one moment in particular, to me, that showed just how degraded Trump’s brain is,” Meyers told viewers on Monday night. “I’m gonna play it because I honestly need help understanding it. If you know what he’s trying to say here, please let me know.”
The clip rolled, showing Trump babbling at the podium, flanked by Attorney General Pam Bondi and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
“You shouldn’t have medians falling down into the roadway,” Trump said, going off script. “Medians, you know, the metal things that are always…” Trump started gesticulating wildly with his hands to describe medians.
As one critic on Threads observed, Trump “mimes the shape of their outline … mimes the steering wheel,” pouring additional speculation on Trump’s state of mind.
It’s also possible that Trump wasn’t even talking about medians at all. His description of “metal things” lined up more with highway guardrails, the long steel barriers meant to keep cars from veering off the road.
A median is a strip of land or concrete dividing opposite lanes of traffic. The mix-up, Meyers suggested, was just another sign of Trump’s muddled thinking.
The more Trump spoke, the more he proved his critics correct: “Somebody had a great, a great lobbyist, because I’ve never seen them look good,” the 79-year-old president continued in the footage. “I’ve been looking at those things with a little, right? They’re always broken, bad.”
The camera then cut back to Meyers, who sat motionless with a vacant stare, milking the silence for laughs. Finally, he snapped out of it: “Hey man, I know prices are down by 1,500 percent, but I think you need to lay off the—[Meyers cut to a clip of Trump saying] “drugs.”
Footage of the segment has since gone viral on social media, with one commenter on Threads observing, “Late night comics are now the best commentators of the dilemma we find ourselves in.”
Meyers next followed up with a word-for-word recitation of Trump’s spin, but in his own voice—exaggerated to make the president sound even more incoherent. “You shouldn’t have medians falling down in the roadway… somebody had a great, a great lobbyist… they’re always broken and bad.”
By now, the crowd was in hysterics.
“I will say it’s ironic that the only thing he seems to like less than comedians are regular medians,” Meyers joked. “Also, is the median lobby something I have to worry about now?” Meyers then delivered a loose imitation of Trump’s voice and vague delivery: “Big median is influencing our government … and the other day I tried to kiss Melania and I couldn’t because there was a median between us.” [Meyers cut to a photo mashup of Trump and Melania separated by a metal fence]
The bit was just one segment in a longer takedown of Trump’s press conference—an event that Meyers said was “embarrassing for all of us.” Earlier that day, Trump had spoken about crime in Washington D.C., claiming it was spiraling out of control and declaring a “public safety emergency” in the nation’s capital.
“This is an emergency, this is a tragic emergency, and it’s embarrassing for me to be up here,” Trump said at the White House lectern. Meyers pounced: “Yeah, yeah it is, but in a way, it’s embarrassing for all of us.”
He even made his own “chart” tracking the audience’s rising embarrassment throughout Trump’s remarks—mocking the moment when Trump held up a real chart in the Oval Office last week and introduced it with: “These are different cities throughout the world… red is… OK?”
“Wait a second, I’m sorry, what the f—k are you talking about?” Meyers said to laughter. “Is this his new catchphrase now? He’s like a lazy magician who doesn’t make you take a card, he just holds one up and acts like that’s what it was gonna be. ‘You kids like magic? Watch this. Jack of Diamonds… OK?’”
Meyers reminded viewers that this wasn’t the first time Trump had leaned on baffling statistics. He replayed a moment from Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement, when the president listed “seemingly random figures” and claimed he had lowered drug prices by “1,500%”—a mathematical impossibility, but spot on according to Trump’s calculations.
“We’ve had presidents who’ve lied before, but we’ve never had a president who was this easy to fact-check,” Meyers said. “But who are you going to believe? The stat nerds at CNN, or the guy who says we can lower drug prices by 1,500 percent?”
CNN had, in fact, corrected Trump’s claims about D.C. crime rates in real time during the press conference, showing that violent crime had not increased. That didn’t stop Meyers, who didn’t have to work hard to turn Trump’s rambling about medians into late-night comedy gold.
Back on social media, the commentary was even sharper, with users mocking the press conference as yet another sign Trump was losing his grip.
One person shared a meme of MSNBC political host Lawrence O’Donnell asking, “If Trump gets dementia, how will we know?”
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