Late-night hosts roasted King Charles’s state visit and Donald Trump trying to push the cost of his $400m gilded ballroom on to taxpayers.

Jimmy Kimmel

Tuesday was “another weird day”, said Jimmy Kimmel on his most recent show. “There’s so much nonsense – and I mean that in a very literal sense of the word: non-sense happening. And at the same time, there are also so many awful and scary and flat-out unbelievable things going on. The world has been turned upside down, mostly for no good reason.

“And so today we got a visitor, one of the very few people who might actually be able to tip things even slightly in a positive direction.” That would be King Charles, in town with Queen Camilla for a rare state visit.

“Trump has a particular affinity for the royal family, and so in Washington, they pulled out all the stops to welcome the king and queen,” Kimmel noted before footage of Washington streets accidentally lined with the Australian flag instead of the union jack. “Somehow, they screw everything up,” Kimmel laughed. “There’s a literal false flag operation going on there.”

In prepared remarks to welcome the royals, Trump mentioned his mother Mary McLeod, a Scottish immigrant who was married to his father Fred Trump for 63 years. “That’s a record we won’t be able to match, darling,” Trump then said to his wife Melania Trump. “I’m sorry, it’s just not going to work out that way.”

“Wait a minute … did he just make a joke about his death? My God. You should be fired for that,” Kimmel marveled, just days after Trump and Melania called for him to be fired over his joke that the first lady glowed “like an expectant widow”.

“Only Donald Trump would demand I be fired for making a joke about his old age, and then a day later go out and make a joke about his own old age,” Kimmel added.

“Just when you think they’ve hit peak ridiculous making a big thing out of this joke, they then top themselves and charge – criminally charge! – former FBI director Jim Comey, who Trump doesn’t like because he did his job and investigated him.” The Trump administration formerly charged Comey with obstruction of justice and making a false statement, both of which were tossed from court. This week, they charged him with threatening the president’s life for posting a photo on Instagram of seashells on the beach spelling out “8647” with the caption “cool shell formation on my beach walk”.

The image could be interpreted as “86ing” (the old restaurant term to throw something out) the 47th president, but “Trump’s pets in the DoJ are claiming this is some sort of threat or call to violence”, Kimmel explained.

“Even he should be embarrassed by this,” he added. “That is not a threat. That is a piece of art your aunt with a beach house would buy on Etsy.”

The Daily Show

On the Daily Show, Josh Johnson dug into more fallout from the White House correspondents’ dinner shooting over the weekend, which shook up the DC elite though resulted in no injuries. “First of all, terrible week for light-skinned dudes,” Johnson said next to a photo of the suspected attacker, Cole Allen, handcuffed and prone on a hotel room floor. “You had this guy going for the president and chewing carpet, Klay Thompson cheating on Megan Thee Stallion … no pressure but Drake, this album’s gotta be fire. It’s all on you.” (The Canadian rapper’s next album, Ice Man, comes out in May.)

“But that was just my takeaway,” Johnson continued. “Republicans had another, somehow dumber takeaway.”

Johnson then played clips of Republican senators who have used the thwarted attack as momentum to push legislation to fund Trump’s proposed gilded $400m ballroom with taxpayer money. “Four hundred million dollars?! That’s our money!” Johnson fumed. “Why do we have to pay for this? We didn’t try to shoot the president!

“This is the administration that is obsessed with government waste,” he continued. “I can’t believe they dissolved Doge right before Trump demanded a $400m ballroom. It’s like how the Michael Jackson movie ended right before he starts molesting. You just went ahead and skipped all the important stuff, huh?

“We live in such a crazy time now that events don’t even need to be connected to each other,” he added. “Someone tried to kill the president, so now we’re going to build a ballroom!”

Johnson, at least, wasn’t that surprised. “Honestly, as soon as I heard about the ballroom, I knew we would end up paying for it,” he said. “Trump is the type of dude to wine and dine you, and then forget his wallet.”

Seth Meyers

And on Late Night, Seth Meyers also touched on King Charles’s state visit to the White House “in honor of America’s 250th anniversary, as well as the 280th anniversary of their hands”, he joked next to photos of their very old-looking hands.

Sunday marked Melania Trump’s 56th birthday, which her husband did not acknowledge on any of his personal social media accounts. “Look, it was a crazy weekend,” said Meyers. “I would be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that he was too busy if he hadn’t found time to congratulate Lee Greenwood on the birth of his grandchild” in a post on Truth Social.

“And apparently the baby is already sick of that song,” he added of the God Bless the USA singer.

And in other non-political news, the music streaming platform Spotify announced that its most streamed album of all time, with more than 20m streams, is Bad Bunny’s 2022 masterpiece Un Verano Sin Ti. “And if you’re wondering what that translates to, about 38 cents,” Meyers quipped.