Stephen Colbert says the RNC is too dark to watch, but Samantha Bee and Trevor Noah still make light

(Image credit: Screenshots/YouTube/The Daily Show, The Late Show, Full Frontal)

Stephen Colbert tried something a little different for his live Republican National Convention recap on Wednesday's Late Show — a boycott. "Now I know that by not watching the RNC, I didn't do my job tonight, and I just wanna say: I feel great about it," he said. They don't acknowledge America's 180,000 COVID-19 deaths, Hurricane Laura, or that "heavily armed Rambo wannabes are murdering people in our streets," and "why should we watch their reality show if it doesn't reflect our reality?"

Colbert said he thinks Americans should — and do — care about Trump and his party's serial violations of the Hatch Act and other laws, and offered "a prescription" for anyone "getting too numb to all of this." (It's called "Notnormalzal," and it involves lots of face-slapping.) This RNC is "a multi-headed spineless creature that lives on your fear" for political gain, he said, "but stoking fear is a dangerous game," as the killings in Kenosha illustrate.

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This year's RNC has been "scraping the bottom of the barrel for any trolls and racists that have a webcam and a working CompuServe account," Samantha Bee said at Full Frontal. "We hate to give these people attention, but we also can't write them off because, funny story, the Republicans have shown a willingness to let fringe lunatics take over their party."

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And "the Republican Party isn't just legitimizing their fringe supporters at the RNC, they're also trying to get them elected to office," Bee said, pointing at the "more than 50 supporters of QAnon" running for national office. "And naturally instead of dismissing them as a domestic terror threat, the president seems pretty happy about their support," she said. "If Trump found out Jeffrey Dahmer liked him, his response would be: 'That's so nice. From what I understand, he had very good taste in people.'"

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To be fair to the RNC, "one speaker was pulled at the last minute for tweeting out an antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory," Trevor Noah said at The Daily Show, though "I'm worried that this does set a dangerous precedent, because now there's a 95 percent chance that Trump also gets the boot come Thursday." And aside from all the Trumps, "the Republican convention so far has been a standard affair" — well, except for all the taxpayer-funded abuse of power, Noah said. "If Trump can't be bothered to maintain even the cosmetic appearance of democracy, it's not his second term that people should be worried about, it's his third and his fourth." Watch below. Peter Weber

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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.