The “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” studio audience burst into applause Thursday night when CNN anchor Anderson Cooper made a passing joke about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth‘s use this week of a fake Bible verse from “Pulp Fiction.”
During remarks at a Pentagon worship service on Wednesday, Hegseth recited the modified version of the Ezekiel 25:17 Bible verse famously uttered — and oft-quoted — by Samuel L. Jackson’s hitman Jules Winnfield in writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-winning 1994 crime comedy. “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert took a few cracks at Hegseth for the moment during his Thursday night monologue, and Cooper could not help but join in on the fun when he sat down to speak with the comedian later in the night.
“This administration says this is not a war, and yet they insisted on renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War,” Cooper noted. “You know, Secretary Samuel L. Jackson calls himself the Secretary of War.” It took the “Late Show” audience only a moment to realize Cooper’s joke and, once they had, they quickly burst into applause.
“They attack reporters who say that this is a war,” the anchor concluded after the applause break, addressing the Trump administration’s confusing rhetoric regarding the conflict. “So it’s an ‘excursion,’ as the president says, which I’m not sure if he actually means incursion, but I don’t know.”
Earlier in the night, Colbert asked Cooper if the current war in Iran feels different from other international conflicts that the United States has engaged in. Cooper responded by echoing the thoughts of his CNN colleague, Clarissa Ward.
“I’m not sure what the metric of success is,” he said. “People talk about the Fog of War. Rarely does that fog emanate from a giant machine at the White House that’s, like, blowing fog out. The administration has essentially given a whole bunch of different explanations for why the president decided to do this. It was regime change for a while and then it was not regime change, and then the president is now saying, ‘Well, actually, there has been regime change because there’s new people sitting in the seats because the old ones were killed off.’”
