Trump’s TikTok ban mocked by Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers

Late-night comedians question President Donald Trump’s proposed TikTok ban

The pandemic. An economic crisis. The 2020 election. TikTok. These are the most pressing issues for President Donald Trump right now.  The problem for late-night comedians like Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers is that the list of priorities is backward for the White House after President Trump floated the idea of a TikTok ban.

According to experts, there are security concerns with the TikTok app. Created by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, the popular video and social media platform has come under scrutiny for its privacy settings. Questions on how the Chinese government could access user data have been raised while several U.S. companies have prevented employees from using TikTok on company phones.

However, there are those who say that banning TikTok would be a drastic measure and one motivated more by politics than national security. President Donald Trump is not among those as he suggested the government was close to banning the app or forcing a sale to a U.S. company.

Given everything going on in the country, President Trump’s fixation with TikTok made for low-hanging fruit on late-night television. Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers both had a unique take on the story.

Jimmy Fallon wonders if Sarah Cooper is to blame for a potential TikTok ban

Before the idea of banning the app dominated the news, a discussion about TikTok and President Donald Trump only involved comedian Sarah Cooper. She has turned her lip-synching videos into a pop culture phenomenon thanks to TikTok.

President Trump’s thin skin has been well-documented. So it is not out of the realm of possibilities that part of his motivation for banning TikTok is taking away a platform used by Cooper and others to mock him. Jimmy Fallon suggested as much while mocking the president to open up Monday night’s Tonight Show monologue:

Jimmy Fallon’s shout-out to Cooper comes just a few weeks after the comedian was a guest on The Tonight Show. Cooper shared the inspiration behind her Trump TikTok videos and discussed her creative process.

Fallon also reminds us that it may have been TikTok users behind President Trump’s Tulsa rally debacle. Thousands and thousands of ticket requests were placed by TikTok users who had no intention of going, giving Team Trump a false sense of confidence going into what was ultimately a dud.

The Tonight Show also covered President Trump’s push for Microsoft to buy the video app. Fallon isn’t all that convinced it’s a good idea for Microsoft to get involved in an app popular with young people. But even if Microsoft does acquire TikTok, it won’t stop comedians like Sarah Cooper and others from embarrassing the president.

Seth Meyers took A Closer Look at President Trump’s TikTok obsession

Nobody in late-night television has questioned White House priorities quite like Seth Meyers. Just about every installment of “A Closer Look” questions whether there is any plan in place for governing the country. This has certainly been highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Monday night’s “A Closer Look” first covered the scrapped plan for nationwide testing led by Jared Kushner. Meyers then pivoted to what President Trump was focused on instead of public health and the answer was, again, TikTok.

Seth Meyers makes a point to include the word “pretend” in covering President Trump’s threat to ban TikTok. It is the Late Night host’s way of reminding his audience that the president doesn’t exactly have the power to unilaterally ban an app. But then again, Meyers has repeatedly reported on how the president thinks he is above the law.

Meyers isn’t all that worried about the app’s future when it is President Trump and the Republican Party attempting to regulate social media. The party’s older class of lawmakers have demonstrated they are a bit out of the loop when it comes to the technology and can’t quite tell the difference among Facebook, Twitter, Google, and anything else on their phones.

The Late Night host jokes that threatening to ban TikTok makes Donald Trump feel like he’s the president. The problem for Meyers is that we need someone to actually be the president. On top of that, we already have someone pretending to be the president and she is far more entertaining to watch:

Who do you think had the better jokes, Jimmy Fallon or Seth Meyers? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section. Keep checking Last Night On for more highlights from The Tonight Show, Late Night, and more