“I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve got chills, I’ve got nausea,” Stephen Colbert told viewers at the top of his last live show of the week Thursday night. “It’s either the onset of COVID or seeing 1,500 people with no social distancing, no masks or testing packed on to the South Lawn of the White House. I know Republicans like voter suppression, I didn’t know they kicked it up to voter extinction.”
While The Late Show host admitted that he skipped the third night of the Republican National Convention out of disgust for the GOP’s constant lies, he did tune in to see Donald Trump deliver his big speech on Thursday, because “he is the president, and at this point the entire Republican Party.”
Colbert also caught the speech from “White House senior daughter and American Girl doll just following orders” Ivanka Trump, who boasted about working “alongside the president as he signed into law nine pieces of legislation to combat the evil of human trafficking.”
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“And then I watched him tell one of those human traffickers that he wished her well,” the host added, referring to the president’s shocking comments about accused Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
The president’s daughter concluded her speech with this simple message: “Washington has not changed Donald Trump. Donald Trump has changed Washington.”
“She’s right, actually, and that’s weird,” he replied. “You see, the presidency proverbially changes the occupant. It matures them, it ages them.” Showing side-by-side photos of President Barack Obama at the beginning and the end of his eight years in office, Colbert joked, “The guy on the left looks like he should be persuading the guy on the right to give up his car keys.”
“But Trump doesn’t do any of the stuff that matures or ages you,” he continued, “like worrying about the American people or feeling responsibility for protecting them or evidently anything else.” Showing how little Trump has aged in four years, he added, “I guess it’s true what they say: Taxidermy don't cracks-a-dermy.” And then, “The last four years are like Trump is Dorian Gray and we’re the picture!”
From there, Colbert turned to Trump’s speech, in which he relentlessly attacked Joe Biden, calling him a “destroyer of American greatness.” In response, the host shot back, “Wow, for a sleepy guy who doesn’t leave his basement, Biden is pretty productive.”
If there was one line of the address that the host agreed with it was when Trump declared, “Americans are exhausted.”
“Yes, we are, after listening to you for 70 minutes,” he said. “But at last it's over, after four nights of bone-chilling nonsense from America’s top trash bags.”
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