Late Night Tackles TrumpCare
Stephen Colbert likens Trump to Jeff Sessions' bad boyfriend, is speechless over the GOP health-care mess
Stephen Colbert said on Tuesday's Late Show that he had no words to describe what the U.S. government has been doing over the past 24 hours. "It's like describing a new color that you've never seen before, and this color is made of all the other colors dying," he said, "like if a rainbow got gangrene." Then he spent the next three minutes trying to explain what the Senate is doing with health care.
Republicans have tried to repeal ObamaCare three times so far this year, "but they finally figured out why they failed," Colbert said. "They failed because people knew what was in their bill — huge mistake. So today, they raised the bar on lowering the bar." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's big idea was to have the Senate vote to consider approving an unwritten health-care bill. "It's a black box we can't see inside — it's Schrödinger's health care, but the cat is probably dead because it doesn't have health insurance," Colbert said. "They now have 20 hours of debate to fine-tune the bill that they did not write for the past seven years. It should be fine — they already know the big stuff, like it will be printed on paper, and that's it."
The second big pile of craziness out of Washington was Trump's speech to the Boy Scout Jamboree, and the third was his mounting abuse of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Colbert read Trump's latest tweets, starting with the president's complaint that the "beleaguered" Sessions isn't investigating Hillary Clinton's "crimes & Russia relations." Trump's "got a point," Colbert said. "He's not looking into Hillary's ties to Russia, and during the debates, we know she met with known Russian sympathizer Donald Trump at least three times, shared the stage with him!"
Why doesn't Trump just fire Sessions? Reportedly, he wants to humiliate Sessions until he quits. "Trump's like a bad boyfriend who's too scared to break up with you and is daring you to break up with him," Colbert said, with some exasperation. Sessions apparently has no intention to end this, but Trump is reportedly already considering replacements, including Rudy Guiliani and Sen. Ted Cruz. "You know you want Cruz at the head of Justice," Colbert said. " We all remember how Trump spent the campaign calling him 'Truthful Ted.'" He ended by having Sessions — or a diminutive facsimile thereof — explain his anger at Trump. Watch below. Peter Weber