In a rare Friday episode, The Late Show host Stephen Colbert spent his opening monologue cataloguing the events of the past week that led to Donald Trump being diagnosed with COVID-19. It's a riveting watch.
Colbert, who is normally one of the more critical voices when speaking about the 45th U.S. president, struck a more solemn tone in his monologue. His reservations with Trump's conduct in general, and handling of the coronavirus pandemic specifically, are still quite clear, but Colbert accepts the enormity of the situation Americans are currently grappling with.
How, he asks at one point, could anyone in the orbit of the U.S. president allow this to happen? Yes, Trump's own resistance to basic medical guidance about COVID-19, as well as his politicizing of the pandemic, is a big reason why he's now sick. But the executive branch of the United States federal government is more than just one person, and the reckless decisions that led to what seems now like an inevitable outcome would have been unthinkable in any other administration in the nation's history.
