Bill Murray’s latest creative endeavor is an experimental spoken word and music album called New Worlds that finds the comic actor teaming up German cellist Jan Vogler. On Thursday night, he stopped by The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and, after joking around with the host about his beloved Chicago Cubs, he performed the ">West Side Story medley that closes out the album.
Murray ran through “Somewhere” and “I Feel Pretty” before arriving at “America.” Though that song—like the others—was written in the 1950s by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, the verse that Murray chose to end with feels awfully relevant to our current moment.
“Immigrant goes to America. Many hellos in America,” Murray sang. “Nobody knows in America. Puerto Rico’s in America!”
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That last line got a huge cheer from Colbert’s audience, who no doubt perceived it as a shot across President Trump’s bow. As Hillary Clinton said while Trump was still focused on the NFL, “I’m not sure he knows that Puerto Ricans are American citizens.”
While Trump has expressed nothing but support for hurricane victims in Texas and Florida, he has been continually hostile toward Puerto Ricans, tweeting on Thursday, “We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever!”
