Stephen Colbert on Trump's Scotland trip: ‘A grift for the whole family'
'Folks, I read once that if you're a passenger in an auto accident, it helps if you're just a little drunk,' said Stephen Colbert on Tuesday evening. 'Because – and the science backs this up – a drunk passenger is a little loose. And if you're a little loose, you're less likely to get severely injured than if you tense up right before impact.'
'Which brings me to our president,' the Late Show host continued. 'I think at this point, it would help if we were all just a little drunk. Because maybe then it wouldn't be so painful when he drives the world into a telephone pole.
'We all know that he's crazy,' he added, 'but some of the crazy stuff is just to distract us from the crazier stuff. And maybe we should stop trying to stop every crazy, because stopping some of crazy makes the crazy stuff seem less crazy than he could possibly craze. And let's face it – if you think we're going to stop all the crazy, you cray-cray.'
The latest 'case of cuckoo' came courtesy of a Republican lawmaker who introduced a bill to rename the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to the Donald J Trump Center for the Performing Arts. The bill's sponsor claimed that 'Trump is a patron of the arts and a staple of the pop-culture landscape'.
'I'm sorry, but it's true: Trump is a staple of pop culture. Just last week, he was great on South Park,' Colbert quipped, referring to the Comedy Central animated program whose latest season premiere showed a naked Trump in bed with Satan.
The center was originally named for Kennedy just months after his assassination, as a living memorial for the slain president. 'You know what they say about those who forget the past: they name stuff after Donald Trump,' Colbert joked.
In other presidential news, Trump spent the past few days in Scotland, 'to negotiate trade golf over his golf tariffs on European golf, because he went there to play golf,' Colbert explained. 'He spent your tax dollars to open his new course in Aberdeen', designed by his middle son, Eric – an occasion, as Colbert put it, that celebrated 'a grift for the whole family'.
On Late Night, Seth Meyers recapped a recent JD Vance event in Ohio, where the vice-president was asked about the Jeffrey Epstein files still dogging Trump. Vance said Trump has been 'incredibly transparent about that stuff'.
'And I agree – we can absolutely see right through him,' said Meyers.
On Monday, Trump said that the baseline tariff rate for the world would be between 15-20%, and added: 'You can't sit down and make 200 deals.'
'I mean, come on, where would he find the time?' Meyers joked.
In a post over the weekend on Truth Social, Trump suggested that NBC – Late Night's network – should lose its broadcasting license. 'Oh, come on, the show wasn't that bad,' said Meyers next to an old still from Trump's NBC reality program The Apprentice.
And during a media appearance over the weekend, Trump was asked whether he rushed to finish a trade deal with the European Union to 'knock the Jeffrey Epstein story out'.
'Oh yeah, I'm sure all the conspiracy theorists in Maga will stop talking about Epstein now that there's a new trade deal,' Meyers joked. ''So you think Trump was on the list or what?' 'Who cares! We can get cheaper sardines from Portugal!''
It's starting to seem like being president of the United States is Trump's side hustle pic.twitter.com/tIotGQgsc2
'Trump is in Scotland right now, seeing as his favorite island destination has been shut down,' said Daily Show guest host Desi Lydic next to a photo of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein.
'When a president is overseas, it's important for them to project strength and dignity, although an uninvited insect made that a little harder for President Trump,' Lydic said before a clip of Trump freaking out about an apparent bug in his shirt. 'Feels like Trump's accidental dance moves are way more impressive than his intentional ones.'
'I do understand why he was so frantic: that mosquito was also asking Trump about Jeffrey Epstein,' Lydic quipped.
'Now, Trump was not just wasting time playing golf,' she continued. 'He was also wasting time profiting off golf,' as he opened his latest golf course in Aberdeen. Lydic was not impressed. 'Just a reminder, this man is still the president of the United States,' she said. 'There's a lot going on in the world, and he's at a ribbon-cutting ceremony to promote his golf course? Is this his side hustle, or is America his side hustle?'
'We're just used to this now,' she added, 'but imagine if when Obama was still in office, he kept flying on Air Force One to open up Pizza Hut/Taco Bell franchises.'
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He remains a big fan of The Office, which I smoke out by getting him to adjudicate between the British and American versions – he didn't watch the US one for ages, because he caught snatches of it and thought: 'No, they're doing it wrong.' Five years ago, his daughter watched the whole thing and he realised, 'it's different, but it is good. Because I have a slightly twisted sense of humour, I prefer the British Office, it's darker. You would actually let Michael Scott [Gervais's US counterpart, played by Steve Carell] look after your 18-year-old daughter, whereas I'm not sure you'd let Ricky Gervais's character look after your 18-year-old daughter. Same with my character, he's a lot darker than Todd Packer, the American version. Whether that makes it better or worse, I don't know. It's nastier underneath, which I kind of like.' The late 00s were taken up at least partly with the Harry Potter movies, in which he played the dark wizard Amycus Carrow. His son was 10 and his daughter was six when he shot Half-Blood Prince in 2008. It was the perfect age, you get the impression he'd have done it just so they could meet Daniel Radcliffe. He also got to hang out with Michael Gambon for days on end. 'He's the best storyteller in the world, ever. Joke-teller, raconteur, everything. He told me this joke that lasted a whole week; I could tell it in 15 seconds. It was one of the best weeks of my life.' Nevertheless, he had no lines at all, 'a supporting artist, basically'. The producers enticed him in with the next two books, in which there's more meat on Carrow's bones. But when they came to make the astronomically long Deathly Hallows, parts one and two, the plot had been very slightly tweaked to remove the pivotal moment when his character spits in Professor McGonagall's face and unleashes hell. 'I did three Harry Potter films without saying a single line.' As the father in The Witch, Robert Eggers's acclaimed, hypnotising horror movie, which won lots of indie film awards, including best director for Eggers at Sundance, Ineson felt that he'd got the first part with its own arc. This was 2015, when he was in his mid-40s, realising he actually was an actor, perhaps relatedly, at around the time the industry realised how good he was. He speaks so highly of his co-star, Kate Dickie – 'she should be a dame, she's that good,' he crescendoes a little surprisingly. But his collaboration with Eggers was intense. Ineson sat at the director's shoulder while the other actors were cast. 'It was a weird experience – it felt terribly unfaithful, as if I was cheating on my profession.' They worked together again on The Northman in 2022, which had a broader canvas visually and emotionally, but had the same feeling of The Witch, a film that had an immense amount of knowledge go into it, only a fraction of which you could pin down. 'I have got no idea how Rob has managed to read so much in his lifetime, it feels as if he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of almost every period in history.' If Ineson was never prepared, post-Office, to give in to being typecast as a wanker, he's pretty comfortable with being a supervillain. 'I think with my size, face and voice, 90% of the time I've been on the bad guy side of the line anyway. I would be fighting a losing battle if I was trying to get myself into romcoms. Some things are beyond the realms of casting.' If The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a turning point, the difference is mainly one of scale. 'Although I've been involved with big films before, I've never played a character that is this important to the film and the franchise,' he says, with an amount of trepidation. It's true – there are other people in the movie (Pedro Pascal! Vanessa Kirby!), but if the villain doesn't work, nothing does. 'So if it doesn't make a profit, it's my fault? Is that what you're saying?', he says, mock petrified. The film is already doing fine at the box office. He should relax.
