“It’s almost Halloween and this year is going to be super spooky for Donald Trump,” Stephen Colbert said at the top of his Late Show monologue Monday night. He didn’t even have to bring up the first charges filed in Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation for his audience to know exactly what he was talking about and start cheering wildly.
“I know it’s almost Halloween, but it really feels more like Christmas,” the host added before breaking into a Paul Manafort-themed carol medley. “The charges were actually filed on Friday, but they gave Manafort until today to turn himself in. Wow, we white people really do get arrested differently.”
At Monday’s White House press briefing, Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared that the indictments have “nothing to do” with President Donald Trump or his 2016 campaign. “The real collusion scandal,” she said, “has everything to do with the Clinton campaign.”
“My God, of course!” Colbert replied. “Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia to lose the election. But we never saw it, because we were playing checkers while she was playing three-dimensional lose the election.”
The host also reminded his audience about how Trump and his associates have told the American public again and again that they never knew about any attempts to coordinate with Russia. “Well, how do I put this?” he asked. “Fake news!”
With that, Colbert pivoted to “former Trump foreign policy adviser and groomsmen offering you ecstasy at the ceremony” George Papadopoulos, who we found out Monday pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contact with Russians during the campaign.
“And the details of what Papadopoulos lied about are Papadopo-damning,” Colbert said. On his multiple attempts to set up meetings between higher-level campaign officials and Russian government officials, Colbert added, “You can’t do that. That’s Don Jr.’s job.”
Later, he moved on to Trump’s attempts to pin the Russian collusion scandal on Hillary Clinton, including a tweet that ended with the words “DO SOMETHING!” As Colbert put it, “There’s something just so reassuringly presidential about yelling ‘do something’ into the void.”
“This is huge news, and all the networks scrambled to cover the latest from the Mueller investigation,” Colbert added. “Except, of course, for the president’s roadside petting zoo over at Fox & Friends.”
Before Fox News could get to the indictments Monday morning, it had to cover how millennials are apparently ruining Halloween, with special guest—the actor Dean Cain—there to “try and help break that one down.”
“Wow! I was going to question the legitimacy of our president, but first I gotta hear what TV’s Superman and 51-year-old millennial has to say about candy corn?”
Then they had to cover Halloween candy, and then the problem with the new cheeseburger emoji.
“It seems like Fox News is going out of its way to cover anything other than the Mueller investigation,” Colbert said. “In fact, the only news network more focused on fluff is the one I started to boost the president’s ego: Real News Tonight.”
With that, the Late Show presented a special report about the dancing girls emoji. It turns out they’re not just friends, but actually “satanic lesbians.”
