Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper can kind of see Trump's dark appeal

Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert talk Trump
(Image credit: Screenshot/YouTube/CNN)

CNN's Anderson Cooper played a second excerpt from his interview with Stephen Colbert on Thursday's AC360, and they talked a lot in this segment about President Trump's appeal. Cooper began by asking Colbert if there isn't a "point of critical mass where people will have had enough."

YouTube YouTube
Watch On

"Conservatives used to make fun of liberals for victimhood," Cooper said, but "Donald Trump — I mean, he is promoting a sense of victimhood that seems appealing to a lot of the people listening to him." Colbert agreed that this is one of Trump's appeals, that there are people who "strangely feel like they are like him or that he is like them, when I don't know anyone like him. But he says, 'You and me are the same, and I am being victimized, therefore I understand your experience.' But A, he's not being victimized, and he's like no one — he's born with a gold spoon in his mouth."

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

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.

Sign up

"But the odd thing about the president is that we actually know nothing about him," Colbert said, citing examples. "For a guy who always likes to have a camera pointed at him and always talks about himself, there's very little we can say about him with certainty." At the same time, he said, Trump is "really good at marketing a single idea over and over again, and I'm sure the challenge for real news is to fact-check him more than twice — because the third fact-check sounds like you're being ..." "Petty," Cooper said. "A little bitchy," Colbert countered. "But he'll never stop."

Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.