Stephen Colbert goes overtime tearing apart Trump's disastrous Putin summit
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
President Trump's Monday meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin was so bipartisanly bad, Stephen Colbert had to deliver a double dose of Trump bashing.
On Monday's episode of The Late Show, Colbert started with a surprise: He suggested, per former President Abraham Lincoln's advice, that Americans just "shut up and take" Trump's "alarming behavior" until he's out of office. "Does anyone feel like just taking it?" The audience roared back with a resounding "No," and Colbert responded with "me neither."
So Colbert launched into an anti-Trump tirade, ripping the president's "spineless, toadying" deference to Putin and suggested the Russian leader definitely has incriminating information on Trump. After all, when Colbert — who says he's just a comedian — went to Russia, it was clear "my phone was bugged and my room had cameras in it."
Article continues belowThe Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
After a break, Colbert returned to bring up examples of Republicans, Democrats, and Trump's own staff tearing up the meeting, concluding that it "upset people across the partisan divide in ways that I have not seen in years." So Colbert did a quick calculation using some of the insults Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) had for Trump. He punched in "egotism, plus naivete, times false equivalence," on a calculator to find it added up to "treason."
Watch the whole second monologue below. Kathryn Krawczyk
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.
