Late Night Tackles the State of the Union
Stephen Colbert also sees bias at the FBI, but it won't help Trump
President Trump's first State of the Union speech got pretty high marks from the people who watched it, and among its biggest fans "was Donald Trump, at least judging from all the clapping he did during his own speech," Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday's Late Show, setting up a recurring gag for his monologue. "Now, Trump wasn't the only one giving him a hand," Colbert said, showing some reaction from Fox News. "Of course, Democrats also responded to the State of the Union, and then responded, and responded." The main one was from Rep. Joe Kennedy III. "Nothing says 'Party of New Ideas' more than deploying the newest-model Kennedy," he said. Still, "in the end, hard to say if it was a good speech, because Kennedy did not clap for himself once."
"Of course, nobody is happier with Trump right now than Russia," Colbert said, pointing to Trump's decision not to impose sanctions, as Congress overwhelmingly ordered, on the rationale that the threat of sanctions is deterrent enough. "Oh, so voting to impose sanctions was the sanction," Colbert said. "And in case you were wondering, this deterrent hasn't deterred jack," because, according to the CIA director, Russia plans to meddle in U.S. elections this year, too. "Why would they?" he asked. "It worked."
Meanwhile, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and his fellow Republicans "are trying to hinder the Russia investigation," Colbert said. "Nunes says that his super-secret memo proves that the FBI is biased against Donald Trump — it's part of the FBI's long, shady history of being suspicious of people who probably committed crimes." The memo is "huge with Trump's most loyal supporters, Russian social media bots," he said, and "Monday night, Republicans listened to their robot constituents and voted to release the memo." He wasn't buying the reported premise of the memo, and offered a parable about a man with lipstick on his collar to highlight his point. Watch below. Peter Weber