Stephen Colbert opened The Late Show on Thursday—one year to the day since COVID-19 was officially deemed a pandemic—by playing a slightly altered version of the new PSA featuring four former presidents.
In addition to clips of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter each promoting vaccinations, this one included Donald Trump predicting that the virus would magically “go away” without the need for a vaccine.
In reality, the 45th president was nowhere to be seen in the ad, which premiered online Thursday morning. After dusting off his W. impression to make fun of Bush for picking a baseball game as the thing he’s most looking forward to doing now that he’s been vaccinated, Colbert addressed the one living former president who is conspicuously missing.
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“Maybe his invite got lost in the mail… because he destroyed the postal service!” the host joked. “Ol’ 45 was left out of the POTUS PSA party, but he did put out his own statement about the vaccine.”
From there, he read aloud the “statement” that Trump would rather have tweeted: “I hope that everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t president, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all. I hope everyone remembers!”
“First of all, that’s unbelievably sad,” Colbert replied. “Second, pathetic. Third, how did we even find out about this statement? He can’t tweet this stuff! Did he just print it out and staple it to telephone poles around Palm Beach? He might as well have just released ‘Ex-prez will take credit, and teach you guitar!’”
“We banned him from Twitter,” he concluded. “Can we ban him from paper? Is that possible?”
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