Seth Meyers sees too many parallels between the Trump and George W. Bush administrations
It has been less than two weeks since Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani was killed in an airstrike authorized by President Trump, and Trump still can't get his story straight about why he approved the operation, Seth Meyers said on Monday's Late Night.
Trump has finally settled on claiming that Soleimani was going to target U.S. embassies, but he keeps changing the number. "In the span of two days, he went from not talking about embassies at all to saying it was one embassy to saying it was multiple embassies to saying it was four embassies," Meyers said. "I know Trump is a bad liar, but even for him it's obvious he's making stuff up off the top of his head." Putting on his best Trump voice, he added: "What if it was four embassies? Is that a number where you would all leave me alone? What if they were Embassy Suites, that would be bad, right?"
Even Trump's team is having a hard time keeping up with his lies, Meyers said, and that reminds him of the George W. Bush administration. They did the same thing before the Iraq War, with Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice all lying "repeatedly" about the intelligence they used to justify invading Iraq, he said. That's "eerily similar" to what's going on today.
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"They claimed definitively that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and had ties to the terrorists who carried out 9/11," Meyers said. "They manipulated intelligence and concocted all kinds of lies about that intelligence to justify an immoral and catastrophic war that destabilized the region and the world." Watch Meyers explain more parallels between Trump and Bush in the video below. Catherine Garcia
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Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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