The big story of the week at the moment is that Michael Cohen secretly recorded a number of his conversations with Donald Trump, particularly ones that pertained to Trump’s indirect payoff to Karen McDougal in 2016 before the election. Late Tuesday night, too late for Colbert and “The Late Show” to get on it that day, CNN actually released one of those recordings so everyone could hear it.
So on Wednesday, “The Late Show” began with a cold open that claims that “Cohen didn’t just secretly record Trump. He also secretly videotaped him.”
What followed was a 90-second clip in which they discuss one of those payoffs — the shot is angled so that Trump and Cohen’s heads are just out of frame. This is a lower key bit than we usually get from cold opens on “The Late Show.”
But there are a few amusing bits that are immediately entertaining. The first is probably that the enormous microphone Cohen used to record the conversation is “hidden” in a small plant that he placed on Trump’s desk, and in the video, we see that when the record becomes muffled it’s because Cohen is touching the plant.
Other details include the picture of Vladimir Putin on Trump’s desk, multiple different copies of “The Art of the Deal” scattered around, along with Ivanka’s book, “The Trump Card.” When Cohen compliments Trump on his new poll — which the video miscaptions as “pole” to set up this joke — we see the feet of a woman stepping up onto Trump’s desk to start pole dancing.
And perhaps the best moment comes when Trump asks for a Coke and is given a two-liter bottle with a straw sticking out of it, which he immediately goes to town on.
The whole thing ends, appropriately, with Trump pulling out a giant check for $150,000 made out to “Sex Lady.”