On Tuesday night, on the eve of broadcasting live during the Democratic debates, The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert took on President Trump’s “very, very bad” response to writer E. Jean Carroll’s allegation that the then-real estate tycoon raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-’90s.
“I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?” Trump responded.
“So it didn’t happen because she’s not his type,” offered Colbert. “That is the sound of a man realizing in mid-sentence that he’s not talking to Billy Bush.”
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Colbert then pivoted to the mainstream media’s coverage of Carroll’s allegation against the president of the United States.
“This story didn’t get a lot of coverage when it first broke. For example, The New York Times originally buried the story in the ‘Books’ section, which is smart—they realized it’s the one place the president would never look,” cracked Colbert. “Then there’s our friends at the New York Post, which ran a story about E. Jean Carroll that was mysteriously scrubbed from the tabloid’s website on Friday afternoon. Nobody knew what happened to the link until today, when it was revealed that the Post editor is a supporter of President Trump and ordered the removal of the story.”
Though he is not in fact an “editor” of the Post, CNN broke the news on Tuesday that “Col Allan, the former editor-in-chief of the Post who currently works as an adviser to the paper, ordered the story to be scrubbed from the website.” Allan is “an old lieutenant of Rupert Murdoch,” the owner of the Post, and reportedly ordered not one but two stories on Carroll’s allegation against Trump to be removed from the site—one written by Post reporter Joe Tacopino and the other an Associated Press wire story.
“So, they deleted the article to protect Trump,” said Colbert. “If the Post had a headline for itself, it would be: ‘PROPAGAN-DON! POST PLAYS DEFENSE FOR SEX CRIME.’”
“So it’s gone now,” he continued. “And if you click on the link now, it just goes to a page that says: ‘404 Error: Integrity Not Found.’”
