Trump Praises Jan. 6 Criminals as SCOTUS Overrules Colorado Ballot Ban: A Closer Look

-The Supreme Court ruled today

that Donald Trump can remain on the ballot,

overriding a decision by the Colorado state Supreme Court

that declared Trump ineligible

due to the Constitution’s ban on insurrectionists holding office.

For more on this, it’s time for A Closer Look.

♪♪

Trump has remained completely unrepentant

about the insurrection on January 6th

and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results

and end American democracy.

In fact, he’s got a new slogan at his rallies

repeating the deranged lie that the 2020 election was rigged.

-We want a landslide that is too big to rig --

too big to rig. That’s what we need.

We want a landslide. We have to win.

We have to win so that it’s too big to rig.

Too big to rig.

-Why is he saying it so slowly?

It tells you how little he thinks of his crowd,

that he pronounces one syllable words

the way I read Hop on Pop to my three year old.

All, ball. We all play ball.

Big, rig. Too big to rig.

There’s a new report out that

the Trump White House was awash in drugs,

which would make sense because Trump

is starting to slowly pronounce words

like he just took a giant bong rip.

"You know what’s a funny word? 'Rig.'

It sounds like 'big.' Too big to rig.

Whoaaaa.

Is it just me, or is that windmill spying on us?

I know you’re killing birds, windmill,

and one of these days, I’m going to prove it.

Oh, it just moved. It just moved.

Did you guys see that?"

Also, I’m not making up that story about the drugs.

There was a full inspector general’s report

that the Trump White House was a pill mill.

And then a new report yesterday that said the Trump White House

was just handing out speed and Xanax like candy.

And that story just came and went

because there’s too much going on.

We didn’t have time to talk about it.

Us! Eight years ago, you told me there’d be a story

about the White House pharmacy handing out goodie bags

full of benzos and amphetamines,

I would have figured that’d be a week of Closer Looks.

And now my reaction is, we don’t have time

for that Mickey Mouse bull [bleep].

Anyway, back to Trump. What would a landslide victory

that’s too big to rig even look like?

Because you’ve already claimed that Democrats

rigged the result in California,

where you lost by over 5 million votes

just in one state.

-I always hear Republicans can’t win California.

You can’t win. I will tell you,

if God came down and God was the vote checker,

I believe we would win.

-So now you need a landslide that’s too big to rig,

and you need God to be the vote checker?

I doubt God wants anything to do --

If God came down and counted the votes,

I’m sure you’d accuse him of cheating too.

"I find -- I find the robe very suspicious.

The long, the long, flowing robe which he wears.

Even in the summer. Even in the summer, a robe.

You see the videos of him walking into the voting center.

The robe is normal. And then he walks out.

The robe is bulky.

Because he’s hiding ballots under the robe,

but no one will check the robe because we’re all too woke now."

Trump is unrepentant about January 6th.

In fact, he’s worse than unrepentant.

He’s turned January 6th into a rallying cry

at his campaign events, playing a song by a choir

of convicted insurrectionists.

-At a rally in Houston, Texas, Trump entered with a song

by the so-called January the 6th Choir,

a group of inmates detained on charges

related to the insurrection.

And then he called those individuals "hostages."

-The former president of the United States

stood on a stage and glorified domestic terrorists.

He made a song with the so-called J6 Prison Choir.

Yes, that is a real thing.

Actual January the 6th insurrectionists

in prison, singing together.

-Trump and his campaign

have elevated the so-called J6 Choir,

a group of prisoners who recorded a version

of the national anthem from behind bars.

Trump played their recording with video images

of the violence on January 6th,

running in the background at the very first campaign

rally of his 2024 campaign.

-Man, these Trump rallies are [bleep] weird.

They’re like half megachurch and half Comic-Con,

but with way worse merch.

I mean, put aside -- put aside the fact

that Trump is glorifying a violent insurrection.

There’s nothing I’d rather listen to less

than a choir of adult men

singing a parody version of the national anthem.

And you know who else would think that sounded [bleep]?

Any Trump supporter before you told him what it was about.

Imagine if I walked into a MAGA rally saying,

"Want to hear my new national anthem parody song?

I recorded it over prison phone lines."

They'd kick my ass. Unless I said it’s pro-Trump,

in which case they beg to know where they could download it.

I’m really starting to think these people are hypocrites.

Trump, again, featured a song

from the so-called J6 Prison Choir over the weekend,

and praised them for being heroes.

-You heard the hostages singing -- that was hostages.

They’re the J6 Hostages,

I call them, because they are hostages.

They’re policemen, they’re firemen,

they’re accountants, they’re lawyers.

-I feel like Trump only knows jobs

that were in a Richard Scarry book.

"They’re policemen, they’re firemen,

and one of them is a little worm who drives an apple to work.

But you can’t trust him. He’s a lowly worm."

But Trump continued.

-They’re put in jail for extended periods of time.

For very long periods of time.

They’re hostages. You heard them singing.

You heard the spirit that they had.

The spirit is unbelievable.

That song became the number one song.

-This guy is talking about his dumb little novelty song

like he’s Ed [bleep] Sheeran.

"The Shape of You" is one of the most streamed songs of all time.

The shape of Trump is,

I don’t know, drumstick with googly eyes.

And that was today’s unnecessary use of googly eyes.

Give me the [echoing] googz.

Also, I can’t believe

I’m about to spend time fact checking this, but here it goes.

It is true that after it debuted,

Trump supporters propelled the song

to number one on Billboard’s Digital

Song Sales chart, but saying it was the number one song

is very misleading given that at the time,

the track drew 442,000 official streams

and 25,000 in radio audience,

compared to Morgan Wallen’s "Last Night,"

which drew 38.9 million streams, and Miley Cyrus' "Flowers,"

which drew 106.7 million in airplay audience.

And, by the way, me explaining how music downloads work

is why we don’t have time to talk about how the Trump

White House was handing out Ambien like they were Tic Tacs.

Well played, you sound asleep sons of bitches.

Also, just because you’re number one

in a super specific category,

it doesn’t mean you’re number one overall.

This show is the number one

NBC show in the 12:30 a.m. time slot.

But if I said "Late Night with Seth Meyers"

is the number one show on TV,

I think we’d get some angry phone calls

from the cast of "The Bear,"

and I don’t want to get in a fight with Jeremy Allen White.

Have you seen that guy without a shirt?

Better question. Have you seen him with a shirt?

Did someone steal this man’s shirt?

Could you give it back?

Because it’s making some of us feel bad about our beach bodies.

So Trump is not only unrepentant about January 6th,

he openly celebrates it at his rallies,

and today he got a big assist from the Supreme Court

when they ruled he could stay on the ballot

despite the 14th Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists.

-The High Court just said

moments ago that Mr. Trump

can stay on this year’s presidential ballot in Colorado,

after that state barred him from its Republican primary.

The Colorado Supreme Court had disqualified

Mr. Trump under a constitutional provision

that bars people who engage in insurrection

from holding office.

-It doesn’t take on and say that Donald Trump

did not engage in insurrection.

In other words, the issue of the facts,

is he an insurrectionist or not, was not before the court,

and they do not in any way that I’ve seen so far, in a quick,

quick skimming, take that on.

-So the court didn’t actually touch the question

of whether Trump engaged in insurrection.

Of course they didn’t. Any rational human

who hasn’t currently a Republican office holder

or member of an insurrection themed choir,

can see with their own eyes -- or with a pair of googly eyes --

that it was obviously an insurrection.

The court stayed away from that question

the same way you react when your wife asks

if you think her sister is hot. "What? You have a sister?

I don’t even remember what she looks like."

With all that said, I’m afraid the headlines from this ruling

are going to be misleading because on the one hand,

the court ruled unanimously that Trump could stay on the ballot,

which makes it sound like even the liberal justices

said no candidate can ever be disqualified

for engaging in insurrection. But that’s not what they said.

There was basically a second, much more divided ruling

from the court’s conservatives that went much further and said

only Congress can disqualify a candidate.

-The specific question at hand,

did the Colorado Supreme Court err

in ordering President Trump

excluded from the 2024 presidential ballot?

Well, that the Supreme Court unanimously agreed as yes.

But from there, we see some divisions among the justices.

-Where there was that five-four split was in the particulars.

Five of the justices here,

the majority, so that’s what rules,

said that states can’t unilaterally decide

to take presidents or any federal officers off the ballot.

And instead, that’s a decision

that Congress would have to make in the form of legislation

to decide which candidates could be disqualified

by the 14th amendment's so-called insurrection ban.

-So basically, you have to read the fine print

on the ruling to find out just how dangerous and extreme

the ruling from the court’s conservatives was.

It’s like when you play McDonald’s monopoly

and you think you won, but then you turn it over

and there’s an asterisk that says...

The court’s liberals seem furious at this ruling.

They wrote that the conservative majority attempts to insulate

all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges

to their holding federal office.

Because we all know Republicans in Congress

would never vote to disqualify a Republican candidate

who engaged in insurrection.

The court’s conservatives essentially

gave all future insurrectionists the green light

to run for and hold public office,

which means it’s up to us, the voters, to stop them,

just like we did in 2020. 2024 is the sequel.

It’s like "2 Fast 2 Furious, except it’s called...

-Too big to rig.

-This has been A Closer Look.

♪♪

Hey, everybody. Thanks for watching A Closer Look.

And as a reminder, my brother Josh and I

have started a -- [bleep]

have an established -- podcast

called "Family Trips with the Meyers Brothers."

We hope you listen. We hope you like it.

We’ll see you soon.