Rachel Maddow’s Scoop: Late Night Is Not Impressed

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/arts/television/stephen-colbert-rachel-maddow-trump-taxes.html

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Rachel Maddow’s anticlimactic revelation of President Trump’s 2005 tax return (or part of it, anyway) dominated late-night TV on Wednesday. Stephen Colbert opened “The Late Show” with a drawn-out impersonation of Ms. Maddow. Spoiler alert: It was all buildup, no joke.

Here’s what Mr. Colbert and his counterparts had to say about the tax-return reveal:

Ms. Maddow herself appeared on “The Tonight Show,” where the ever-amiable Jimmy Fallon didn’t press her much on the bathos of her broadcast. She did disclose that the Trump administration refused to verify the tax return until hours before airtime Tuesday and that her team had taped an entirely different show, in case the White House proved the document to be a forgery at the last moment.

On “The Daily Show,” the correspondent Ronny Chieng poked fun at our growing dependence on household appliances with remarkable capabilities in an installment of his recurring segment, “Today’s Future Now.”

James Corden brought his background in theater to bear in this re-enactment of “Beauty and the Beast.”

Seth Meyers thinks Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, might be trying to tell us something. Is “prong” his safe word?

Donna Brazile, the former Democratic National Committee chairwoman and political commentator, has largely stayed out of the spotlight since it was revealed that she fed debate questions to Hillary Clinton while working as a contributor for CNN. But she will be interviewed on “The Daily Show” on Thursday night by Trevor Noah, who just might bring the subject up.

On late-night TV, critiques of the Trump administration are pretty overt. But Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, took a subtler tack on Wednesday, when he joined Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and Nikki R. Haley, the ambassador to the United Nations, for a Broadway show. They attended “Come From Away,” a play about a town in Newfoundland that welcomed travelers from across the globe in the days after Sept. 11, 2001. It was hard not to see it as a jab at the Trump administration’s policies on immigration.