When Stephen Colbert first heard that Melania Trump would be traveling down to Texas to visit immigrant children being held in detention centers without their parents, he thought, “OK, this is what first ladies often do. You go to a troubled area, they see the children, they show that we care. You can’t mess that up.”
Then he saw her jacket.
“Guess what?” he asked. “I spoke too soon.”
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The Late Show host had to stress to his audience that the photo of Melania Trump wearing a jacket that reads in huge white letters, “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” on it was, in fact, real. “We checked it so many times, because we thought, this has to be fake,” Colbert said.
“That’s what they settled on?” he asked. “What was her first choice, a jacket that says, ‘WOMP WOMP?’”
Colbert said that Melania forgot “the most important piece of fashion advice: before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take off that jacket.” He went on to joke that a lot of clothes—and facial expressions—the first lady wears already project the message that she doesn’t really care.
In response to media inquiries about the wardrobe choice, the first lady’s spokesperson said, “It’s a jacket. There was no hidden message.”
“Right. It’s definitely not hidden,” Colbert said. “It’s right on the back. And I’m going to guess this is one message she did not steal from Michelle Obama.”
“How many people would get fired for this at a normal White House,” he asked. “One? Five? The entire executive branch? Because in the middle of the worst moral scandal in recent memory—so bad that her husband backed down for the first time in memory—people who were supposedly on her side let her get on a plane with a jacket that said, ‘I really don’t care, do u?’”
“For the record,” Colbert concluded, “we do.”
