Stephen Colbert: 'The president is anti-Muslim'

Extract from The Guardian

Late-night TV roundup

Late-night hosts mourned for New Zealand, looked into Trump’s history of not condemning racists, and recap Beto O’Rourke’s start on the campaign trail

Adrian Horton

Wed 20 Mar 2019 03.50 AEDT Last modified on Wed 20 Mar 2019 04.10 AEDT

Stephen Colbert: ‘On the one hand, after a terror attack to condemn the extremist ideology of the terrorist should be a slam dunk. On the other hand, [Trump] can’t jump.’ Photograph: Youtube

Stephen Colbert

Late-night hosts kicked off their week with tributes to the victims from the shootings at two New Zealand mosques last weekend, which claimed 50 lives. New Zealand is “the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen and the Kiwis are the kindest people I have ever met”, Stephen Colbert said at the top of the Late Show, as he praised the country’s unity in the wake of a white nationalist terrorist attack that targeted Muslims.

In the wake of the tragedy, President Trump asked New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, how the US could offer support. She requested “sympathy and love for all Muslim communities”.

Unfortunately, “that’s not really Trump’s brand,” Colbert commented. “He’s in a bind,” he added. “On the one hand, after a terror attack to condemn the extremist ideology of the terrorist should be a slam dunk. On the other hand, he can’t jump.”
A compounding issue: Trump “never, ever condemns the racists”.
Colbert then launched into a laundry list of Trump’s most egregiously racist comments: after Charlottesville, he said there were fine people on both sides; his first campaign speech called Mexicans rapists and murderers; he called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries”; he complained that we don’t get enough immigrants from Norway; he said a Mexican judge couldn’t be fair in a case against him; he equivocated over disavowing David Duke and “he calls himself a nationalist”.
“I’m just saying,” Colbert concluded, “if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then why does it keep goose-stepping?”
To counter all the evidence, Trump dispatched his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to the Sunday talkshow circuit; on Face the Nation, Mulvaney encouraged Americans to look at Trump’s actions because “I don’t think anybody can say that the president is anti-Muslim.”
Colbert accepted the challenge, and approached the camera. “The president is anti-Muslim,” he said.

Trevor Noah

On the Daily Show, Trevor Noah analyzed the inaugural weekend of the former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign, which featured a lot of apologizing, starting with his “I was born for this” quote about the presidential race in his splashy Vanity Fair cover story.

 

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Former Texas congressman and handsome scarecrow Beto O’Rourke spends the weekend doing some ‘splainin.

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12:07 PM - Mar 19, 2019

“I’m sorry people, but this is out of control,” Noah ranted. “[People] were like, ‘that’s white privilege, are you saying the presidency is your birthright?’ No. ‘Born for this’ is a figure of speech we all use to indicate that we’re ready for something. I wasn’t actually born for the all-you-can-eat buffet, it’s just something I say.”

O’Rourke also caved to criticism over writing bad fiction as a teenager and joking that his wife was raising their children while he campaigned. It’s a lot of nitpicking, Noah concluded. “This isn’t wokeness, this is insanity.”

“Can you imagine if Beto took this attitude into the White House?” he continued. “North Korea would launch missiles and his aide would be like, ‘Mr President, what do you want to do?’ And he’d be like, ‘Uh, as a white man, maybe it’s my time to listen to what these missiles have to say.’

Seth Meyers

On Late Night, Seth Meyers dug into a marathon weekend for Donald Trump’s Twitter account, scrolling through the president’s ramblings on Fox News, Russian collusion, the Fake News Media, “be strong & prosper, be weak & die,” and one staid “Happy St Patrick’s Day!” (“which is appropriate, since he tweets like he’s in the middle of a bar crawl”, he added).

The weekend tweets were so fast and furious that the Republican strategist and Kellyanne’s husband George Conway simply tweeted: “His condition is getting worse.” “You know, it really says a lot about the state of our politics that we all know who he’s talking about,” Meyers commented. “You don’t even need to say Trump’s name any more. Everyone will just know who you’re talking about if you just tweet ‘He’s yelling at the TV again.’”



Trump’s tweet storm was as unhinged as usual, but Meyers added that “it’s especially unnerving that he chose to spend his time attacking everyone from Saturday Night Live to John McCain just days after the horrific shootings at two mosques in New Zealand.”
Furthermore, Trump subsequently brushed off the threat of white nationalism around the world as “a small group of people that have very, very serious problems”. “First of all, ‘a small group of people that have very serious problems’ isn’t an answer to the question ‘is white nationalism a threat?’ If anything, it’s an answer to the question ‘Who still works for the White House?” Meyers said.
Second, asking Trump if he sees white nationalism as a threat “is like asking Joe Camel is he sees tobacco as a threat”.
Like Colbert, Meyers then turned to the attempted damage control by Mick Mulvaney on the Sunday talkshows. And like Colbert, Meyers also helped Mulvaney with his challenge to name “anybody [who] can say that the president is anti-Muslim”.

“Well, let me try: the president is anti-Muslim,” Meyers said. “Yep, that was not hard at all.”