Stephen Colbert has spent a good part of this week focused on the less consequential stories surrounding Donald Trump, from Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s heritage to that Stormy Daniels “horseface” tweet. But on Thursday night, he dug deep into the biggest story of the week: “Donald Trump reacting to the likely murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi with a firm, ‘I don’t know.’”
The Late Show host gave Trump the minimum amount of credit for at least admitting that it “certainly looks” like Khashoggi is dead but at the same time took him to task for seeming to show zero empathy for the man he keeps reminding Americans was not a “citizen.”
“Trump’s getting some criticism for his bold soft-on-murder stance,” Colbert said, “but some people still have has back, including televangelist and human estate sale, Pat Robertson.” As he put it, Robertson has spent the past few days downplaying Khashoggi's murder and prioritizing the financial benefit of siding with Saudi Arabia.”
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“You’ve got a $100-billion worth of arm sales which is, you know, that’s one of those things, but more than that we’ve got to have some Arab allies,” Robertson said on his somehow still-running show The 700 Club. “I know it’s bad, but I mean we’ve had all kinds of stuff, but you don’t blow up an international alliance over one person. I mean, I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, Reverend, for capturing the core message of Christianity,” Colbert replied. “How important can one man’s death be?”
