What exactly does it take at this point for President Donald Trump to hit a “new low?” In Stephen Colbert’s estimation, he managed to get there on Thursday morning with this string of tweets about Hurricane Maria:
“President Trump has been laser-focused on hurricane response this week. Just not this one,” Colbert said in his Late Show monologue Thursday night of the pending Category 2 Hurricane Florence, which is set to hit the host’s home state of South Carolina on Friday.
Instead, Trump is still talking about last year’s Hurricane Maria, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans. “It’s hard to imagine anything more horrible than that,” he said, “other than this tweet.”
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Repeating Trump’s “I love Puerto Rico” send-off, Colbert added, as the president, “‘Yes, you’re my favorite bunch of lying, ungrateful fake dead people. I like Puerto Ricans who don’t die.’”
“I just want to state that, not only is this a sickening tweet, it is in no way true,” Colbert told his viewers, explaining that researchers arrived at the 2,975 death toll number after the U.S. government commissioned an official study.
“It had been pushed out of the front pages because of all the other bad news about Donald Trump,” he added. “Then he brought it up again. It’s kind of like he was on trial for littering and said on the stand, ‘I only threw that cup out of my window because I was distracted by the homeless man I ran over. Pretty sure he died of old age.’”
