During his monologue on Tuesday’s episode of “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert laid into the ridiculous spectacle that was Donald Trump’s attempt to pretend COVID-19 is no big deal (by among other things, leaving the hospital after just three days and cutting a video about his return to the White House). Among other things, Colbert mocked Trump for telling people COVID-19 isn’t that big of a deal, and as evidence citing a level of medical care available pretty much only to the most powerful person in the world.
Trump was discharged — or discharged himself, a point no one has actually clarified — on Monday night and upon returning home, he walked up a short flight of stairs in front of the White House for a photo-op in which he visibly appeared to struggle for breath. Afterward, he released a pair of videos. The first was a deceptively edited clip set to generic swelling music of Trump walking from Marine One to the White House.
Colbert played an excerpt from that clip and then joked “not only was that campaign propaganda, it was also the trailer for the upcoming movie ‘Triumph of the Ill.’” That, of course, was a reference to the famous 1935 propaganda film by Leni Riefenstahl that glorified Nazi Germany.
Trump also took his mask off immediately after leaving the hospital, something Colbert said “sends a bad message. In fact, the only thing worse than the message this sent is the actual message he sent.” That’s when he played a clip from the second video Trump released, in which he claimed COVID-19 isn’t very dangerous, urged people not to let it “dominate” their lives and then bragged about a bunch of experimental medications that are not available to the vast majority of people who have suffered COVID-19. “We have the best medicines,” Trump said in the clip, “all developed recently.”
“We have the best medicines, we all have experimental treatments that nobody else has gotten,” Colbert said in response. “We all have the best helicopter to fly us to and from our publicly subsidized mansion that contains an in-home intensive care unit itself. We’re definitely gonna beat this virus. That’s what we all have, not sure about you all, though we all have that.”
There’s a lot more about Trump, and as you can guess Colbert doesn’t have a lot of nice things to say. Watch the whole thing above.
Leave a Reply