President Trump's emergency press conference in the Rose Garden on Tuesday was meant to be focused on China. But, surprising nobody, it quickly skidded into a rally-style rant targeting people Donald Trump doesn't like — especially the guy currently tipped to thoroughly pants him at the polls in November.
"Now traditionally, addresses from the Rose Garden are not baldly political events," explained Colbert. "It's where you celebrate champion teams, pardon the turkeys, and celebrate the rare champion turkeys. But this was just another rally speech in which Trump raged and attack Joe Biden by name nearly 30 times. At this point, he's just trying to talk Biden out of his basement."
Trump slammed Biden for leading the effort to give "favored nation" status to China when the U.S. "doesn't have it" (from... itself?) and also for wanting to rejoin the Paris Agreement and push for carbon-neutral buildings, which Trump says would mean "no windows." (He appeared to mean literal windows, as in the ones in buildings.) He also claimed at one point that Biden's position on school choice meant he wants to "abolish educational standards, abolished in the suburbs. You're going to abolish the suburbs with this."
"How desperate is he to scare suburban voters?" Colbert asked rhetorically, shifting into Trump Voice: "'Joe Biden is going to borrow your weed whacker and never return it. OK? He's going to rake his leaves over the property line in your yard. He's gonna tear down your seasonal flag of a kitten sitting in a picnic basket and then not close his recycling bin and that's why the raccoons are just gonna take over.'"
As Colbert noted, the Trump administration is trying to get control of the coronavirus case numbers not by actually doing anything to slow the spread of the virus, but by mandating hospitals to report data to the Department of Health and Human Services instead of the CDC. Which definitely won't result in any Florida-style creative accounting.
"You see, Trump doesn't want us to know what the real coronavirus numbers are," Colbert said. "He knows he's failed. He's just like a kid grabbing his report card out of the mailbox before anyone can see it. But we're going to find out how bad he's doing when we all have to make coffins in shop class."
