“The looming story in America right now is the looming impeachment of Donald Trump over his documented and repeated efforts to get foreign governments to interfere in our election by digging up dirt on Joe Biden,” Stephen Colbert said in Friday night’s Late Show monologue, succinctly summing up the news of the week.
“But if he’s going down, he’s bringing a plus one,” Colbert added.
The host was talking about Vice President Mike Pence, who has also been implicated in the scandal. As Colbert explained, Pence personally pressed the Ukrainian president to investigate “corruption,” which he “had to have known” meant Biden because he was given a transcript of Trump’s original phone call before that meeting.
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“So what’s his excuse?” Colbert asked. “Officials close to Pence say Pence met with [Volodymyr] Zelensky ‘probably without having read—or at least fully registered the transcript,’” he added, quoting from a Washington Post report.
“So he probably didn’t ‘read’ the crime,” Colbert said. “Unless he did, in which case he probably didn’t understand the crime.” He compared the vice president to someone who tries to get out of a ticket by claiming, “I probably didn’t read the stop sign, or if I did, I didn’t register what it said. How could I? I was doing 90 through that school zone.”
Colbert ultimately concluded that Pence can only be a either a “participant or a patsy,” which led him to a round of “America’s favorite game: Corrupt or Dumb.”
“Let’s find out, is this member of the Trump administration corrupt or dumb?” he said. “And… it’s both!”
