The I word

Laura Bradley, a Hollywood writer for VanityFair.com, who was formerly an editorial assistant at Slate and lives in Brooklyn, New York, has the story from Vanity Fair:

On Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump once again had a meltdown so egregious that late-night hosts were forced to re-write their monologues in the minutes between its end and their shows’ tapings. Seth Meyers issued another harsh rebuke of the president’s unhinged press conference Tuesday night, but the most in-depth criticism came from Stephen Colbert, whose team re-wrote his entire monologue in less than an hour and left no Trump comment un-mocked.
Trump was supposed to simply read a written statement during the press conference; as Colbert noted, he could even be seen taking that statement out of his pocket. We never heard what it said, but Colbert guessed it was something along the lines of “Hello, everyone. Today, we are going to see me give the strongest argument for my impeachment yet.”
On Trump’s insistence that there’s “blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it, either”, Colbert said that “the only thing I’m doubting right now is whether you’re still going to be president by Friday, because what the hell are you talking about?!”

On Trump’s assertion that there were plenty of peaceful protesters “the night before” the rally:

“Okay, uh, the night before. Let’s take a look at the night before. Yep, just your average friendly, civic-minded torch-wielding mob. You know, probably holding the torches so everyone could see them point out all the good people there.”

On Trump’s concern that taking down statues of other slave-holders, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, would re-write history:

“Spoken like a guy who’s suspiciously worried that racist presidents don’t get statues anymore,” Colbert quipped. “Yes, taking down a statue is totally changing history. Because the main way anybody learns about history is through statue-based study. That’s how we know that Abraham Lincoln was twenty feet tall and loved sitting down.”

“They had a permit!” “Folks, you’ve got to give it to the Nazis, they always do their paperwork. Very punctual.”

Colbert and Meyers weren’t the only comedians to call out the president, of course. Jimmy Kimmel also spent his entire monologue addressing the press conference, and he finished by speaking directly to Trump voters:

“First of all, I want to say, I get it,” he said. “I actually do. You were unhappy with the way things were going; you wanted someone to come in and shake things up. Every day there’s something nuts, but you’ve been trying to ignore it because you don’t want to admit to those smug, annoying liberals that they were right. That’s the last thing you want to do. But the truth is, deep down inside, you know you made a mistake. You know you picked the wrong guy. And it isn’t getting better. It’s getting worse. So you can do one of two things: you can dig in like Chris Christie at a hometown buffet, or you can treat this situation like you would if you put Star Wars wallpaper up in the kitchen: ‘All right, I got caught up, I was excited; I made a mistake, and it needs to go.’ Well, now he does need to go, so it’s time for you who voted for him to tell him to go.”

On The Late Late Show, James Corden offered his own blow-by-blow, including this astute remark about the President’s grave miscalculation: “Apparently Trump went off-script and improvised all of these remarks during a press conference that was about infrastructure, which is terrible, because I’m pretty sure the first rule of infrastructure is whatever you do, do not burn bridges.”

Rico says he hopes Colbert is right, otherwise we gotta do it the hard way: