From Ellen DeGeneres and James Corden to Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers, these US talk show hosts use their shows to blast Donald Trump's policies
Since Donald Trump’s immigrant ban, (the executive order preventing immigrants from seven Muslim countries from entering the US), high profile figures and companies have been rising up and taking a stand.
The week started with a particularly political 2017 SAG awards on Sunday night, seeing opening host Ashton Kutcher and award-winners using their time on stage to blast Donald Trump and his new policy, expressing their love and thoughts for those affected.
The latest people to take a public stand against the controversial policy, however, are US talk show hosts. From daytime to late night presenters, everyone from Ellen DeGeneres and James Corden to Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers have publicly protested the ban during their talk shows this week.
James Corden kicked off the trend, releasing a pre-recorded video as the opening sequence of the latest episode of his chat show: The Late Late Show with James Corden.
Straying from his usual jokes, this video protested Trump’s Muslim ban in a very simple way, showing James going through border control at LAX airport before flying out of Los Angeles.
The video showed how easy it was for James to pass through airport security, with a statement at the end of the recording reading: ‘Today, James flew out of Los Angeles, so all of our shows this week have been pre-taped. Freedom of movement should be this easy for all legal immigrants. Not just the white and Christian ones.’
Ellen DeGeneres also made her stance on the ban known during her most recent show, protesting it without even mentioning the President’s name. She instead voiced her thoughts on the ban through explaining the plot of her new film, Finding Dory.
‘I don’t know what religion they are’ she says about her character Dory’s family, ‘but her dad sounds a little Jewish. It doesn’t matter.’ She went on to talk about Dory’s struggles to get from Australia to America, explaining: ‘Animals that don’t even need her. Animals that don’t have anything in common with her. They help her, even though they’re completely different colours. Because that’s what you do when you see someone in need - you help them.’
Strangely, Finding Dory was Donald Trump’s film of choice, with the President reportedly screening it at the White House after announcing the ban. Jimmy Kimmel was quick to point out the irony in this, announcing that it ‘is a movie about a fish trying to find her parents’ and joking ‘to his credit, [Donald Trump] was so moved by the film that he lifted all travel restrictions on clownfish.’
Their poignant messages struck a chord with the public, and they weren’t the only ones – TV hosts Conan O’Brien, Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert also voiced their stance against the ban, all referencing the US airport demonstrations.
Colbert praised the protesters who descended upon the US airports following the ban. ‘All of this is upsetting if you're one of those people who thought about it, which is why tens of thousands of protesters spontaneously demonstrated at airports all around the country,’ he explained, before quipping ‘Do you have any idea how angry how people have to be to voluntarily go to JFK?’
Conan O’Brien backed up this point, joking: ‘This weekend, the nation's airports were filled with people protesting President Trump's Muslim ban. It was the largest collection of angry people at an airport since every United Airlines flight.’
Seth Meyers added ‘If you can spend more than two hours at JFK without losing your shit, you should get automatic citizenship.’ He then went on to slam Trump’s immigrant ban, calling it ‘not only cruel and unnecessary, but apparently very poorly thought out.’
‘It's only been a week’ he told the crowd, ‘but the Trump administration has already revealed itself to be a government of incompetent authoritarians with nothing but contempt for many of the basic constitutional principles this country has cherished since its founding.’
