"This is the first crisis of Trump’s presidency that he did not cause himself, and he is shankin’ it,” declared Stephen Colbert in Monday night’s Late Show monologue. The host was summing up a truly dire few days of presidential mishandling, “hunches,” and health misinformation about the worsening coronavirus outbreak, culminating in a Monday market crash where "Wall Street S&P'd itself."
From wearing campaign merch and declaring non-existent COVID-19 tests to be as “perfect” as his Ukraine phone call during a lab visit, to tweeting poorly thought-through comparisons to the flu, Colbert ran through the president’s not-at-all reassuring lowlights.
“We can criticise Trump’s golfing and tweeting,” Colbert noted, having just done exactly that, “but when he hunkers down and focuses on the problem, that’s when he really sucks.”
And while bandleader Jon Baptiste’s muttered asides rarely add much to Colbert’s monologues, one special shout out must go to the moment where his piano punctuates one of the host’s presidential insults with the riff from The Hives’ “Walk Idiot Walk”. That’s niche shade, just for the '00s indie fans, right there.
Topics Health Donald Trump Politics COVID-19
