Maybe we don’t all put our pants on one leg at a time. Over the weekend, former president Donald Trump made headlines for [checks notes] not wearing his pants backward, despite appearances to the contrary, at a Republican Party state convention in North Carolina. Surprisingly, this is not the first time Trump’s pant legs have drawn national attention, and late night television had a field day with the ex-Commander-in-Chief and his woefully wrinkled trousers.
“It’s like he’s wearing a fanny pack on the inside of his pants,” quipped Jimmy Fallon at the top of The Tonight Show. “It looks like he bumped into something and his pants deployed in an airbag.” Fallon even went so far as to make a fake Men’s Warehouse ad for the Front Butt Collection: “You’re gonna like the way your front butt looks. I guarantee it.”
On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Jimmy Kimmel blew through the history of Republican politicians and their weird pants—from Chris Christie to Mitch McConnell to Ronald Reagan, ending with Rudy Giuliani and his famous pants unzipping moment seen round the world in Borat: Subsequent MovieFilm. “Poor Mike Pence didn’t know which end to kiss,” Kimmel added. “It was very confusing.”
Stephen Colbert took a more analytical approach to the situation on The Late Show, saying that he couldn’t see a zipper on Trump’s pants from the front. “Either he shares a tailor with a Ken doll, or he spends so much time yanking stuff out of his keister, it just helps to have the zipper back there to make it easy,” Colbert said. He went on to note how the internet quickly compared Trump’s look to that of 90s child hip-hop duo Kriss Kross, who famously and intentionally wore their pants backwards . “That, of course, is ridiculous,” Colbert said. “There initials are KK, which is one less than the ex-president prefers.”
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