On Friday night’s episode of “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert delivered some pointed words about what was somehow not the biggest story of the week — Donald Trump’s apparent threat to not sign the government funding bill because it doesn’t pay for his border wall.
“I have got great news. Our government continues to exist,” Colbert said to open his monologue. “Because this week the Senate passed a spending bill that would keep the government open until December. But no one is sure if Trump will sign it. Especially since he tweeted, “I want to know, where is the money for Border Security and the WALL in this ridiculous spending Bill, and where will it come from after the Midterms?’
“I’m going to guess not from Mexico? The only thing Trump has been able to build so far are the eight wall prototypes that went up last year. They are different shapes and colors. They are like accent walls. Because they are to keep out anyone with an accent.”
Colbert then reminded us of Trump’s visit to the fake walls back in March. Then “The Late Show” played a clip in which Trump delivered a speech about how much he loved the prototypes.
Trump: “I have just come from a trip to the border where I met with our wonderful border agents, border patrol, and the ICE agents, unbelievable people, and reviewed prototypes of a new physical wall that will protect our border and protect our country… It is going to be very effective… it will be 99.5 percent successful.”
“It turns out, he was 100 percent yanking that out of his butt,” Colbert said after the clip, before leading into a pretty lengthy parody Trump campaign chant. “Because a government report shows that all of the border wall designs can be broken, and every one of them was vulnerable to at least one breaching technique, and in at least one case crews were able to make the prototype wall completely unstable to the point of collapse.
“So the wall fell down? Now we know the chant for the 2020 rallies. ‘Rebuild the wall! Put it back up! Maybe with some struts or dig a deep moat or something! Put some crocodiles in the moat! Fill the moat with gasoline and make the crocodiles flame proof!’ ”
Colbert then pivoted to the incident in which Trump suggested that Spain build a wall of its own — across the Sahara Desert.
“Trump seems to think that walls are the solution to every problem, because Spain’s foreign minister just revealed that Trump urged him to build a wall across the Sahara. What?” Colbert said.
“The Sahara Desert, the largest desert in the world. You can’t construct a wall in the desert! Building something on sand is literally the metaphor for instability. ‘After you build the wall on sand, you can make yourself a beautiful house of cards to live in. Maybe, think about this, maybe the cards could be made of glass and keep your stone collection in there.’
“Does our president really think people who trudge through a thousand miles of the most brutal desert on the planet will go, ‘Wait, there’s a wall. Darn it, okay. Let’s go back’?”
You can watch this portion of Colbert’s monologue from Friday night’s episode of “The Late Show” in the video embedded at the top of this post. They seem to have had a bit of a hiccup with the aspect ratio, but it’s certainly still watchable.