Colberts Giddy Response to Trumps Failed Attempt at a Burn: I Won
Colbert’s Giddy Response to Trump’s Failed Attempt at a Burn: “I Won”
On Thursday night, the Late Show host delivered one of his most scathing rants yet.
by
Laura Bradley
May 11, 2017 9:48 pm
The schoolyard insult-slinging between Stephen Colbert and Donald Trump continues. The president recently caught wind of the particularly harsh rant Colbert went on last week—the one that got Trump supporters so riled they started complaining to the F.C.C.—and couldn’t help but try and land a jab of his own. (It didn’t go so well.) On top of the inaccuracy of Trump’s response, the president made an even more monumental miscalculation by responding in the first place—and handing Colbert exactly what he’d wanted all along.
“The president of the United States has personally come after me and my show—and there’s only one thing to say,” Colbert said on Thursday night, after reading Trump's entire complaint about him in his "Trump" voice and before bursting into a fit of giggles. “Yay!”
Colbert’s enmity with the president has done nothing but strengthen his Late Show—and by responding to Colbert’s jab, Trump simply poured kerosene on an already raging fire. The Late Show host has been on a ratings roll for the last week, finally beating Jimmy Fallon in the key 18 to 49 demographic thanks, at least in part, to all the furor surrounding last week’s lewd Trump joke. And that’s precisely why Colbert shamelessly celebrated this as a victory: he finally got the president to complain about him by name, joining the ranks of institutions as S.N.L. and The New York Times—among others. None of them seem to have suffered much for it.
“Mr. Trump, there’s a lot you don’t understand,” Colbert continued Thursday night. “But I never thought one of those things would be show business. Don’t you know I’ve been trying for a year to get you to say my name? And you were very restrained. Admirably restrained! But now you did it. I won.”
From there, Colbert launched into one of his most scathing rants yet, pummeling the president from every angle, including those that could hurt the most. After months of needling Trump, it's clear Colbert knows exactly which buttons to push—not things like the backlash surrounding Trump's decision to fire James Comey, but pettier material. The stuff that really keeps Trump up at night.
“Oh, please don’t make me trend on Twitter again,” Colbert snarked. “Don’t throw me in that #briarpatch. But you’re not wrong. I will give this to the man: I do occasionally use adult language, and I do it in public—instead of in the privacy of an Access Hollywood bus. And it’s true. The night you appeared on the show, right over there, was very highly rated. In fact, the only episode that got better ratings was the night I had Jeb Bush on. That’s right. You got beat by low-energy Jeb.” (Bush appeared on the first episode of Colbert’s Late Show, which garnered 6.6 million viewers—compared with the Trump episode’s 4.6 million later that month.)
“But don’t worry,” Colbert continued. “You won the Ratings College. And making jokes about you has been good for ratings; it’s almost as if the majority of Americans didn’t want you to be president. But you know who’s got really bad ratings these days? You do. Terrible approval numbers. I hear they’re thinking about switching your time slot with Mike Pence. But since all of my success is clearly a based on talking about you, if you want to take me down, there’s an obvious way: resign. I mean, if you did that, what would I talk about then—except your resignation, because that would be fun. And here’s the thing: a president going after someone telling jokes is unprecedented. That’d be like Richard Nixon going after Alfred E. Neuman. And if I may, Mr. President, I’d like to quote that great man: ‘What, me, worry?’“
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