Stephen Colbert on the pandemic: ‘If it were a movie, it would be Tenet’
Stephen Colbert attempted to sort through the bleak deja vu of Omicron winter in New York on Wednesday evening. “If this pandemic were a movie, it would be Tenet,” the Late Show host said. “It’s impossible to understand, and I just wish it would end, which turns out is the beginning.”
The host also reacted to a subtle shift in public health messaging in recent days, as the US reached record numbers of Covid infections: “They’re trying to make us get used to all of this,” Colbert noted.
He pointed to testimony on Omicron’s transmissibility from the White House medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci on Tuesday: “Omicron will infect just about everybody.”
“Do you hear that? Being attacked for two years has clearly broken Dr Fauci,” Colbert said, imitating the doctor: “Rip off your mask, go to hot yoga, on the way home tug a hobo – I don’t give a vaccinated crap. We’re all doomed.”
Fauci also said that those who have been vaccinated will “very likely, with some exceptions, do reasonably well”.
“There are certain things I don’t want to equivocate on,” Colbert responded. “My life is one of them. You don’t want to hear a skydiving instructor say, ‘Jump from the plane! You will very likely, with some exceptions, do reasonably well.’”
According to experts, unvaccinated people are 10 times likelier to be infected with Omicron and 20 times likelier to die. “They’re also 50 times likelier to start a fight with a Kroger employee because the Mexican food aisle is in Spanish,” Colbert quipped.
Seth Meyers
On Late Night, Seth Meyers recapped a rare interview appearance by Donald Trump on a mainstream media network, the US national radio network NPR. “For some reason, Trump thought it would be a good idea to call into NPR,” Meyers explained, “where he seemed
to be caught off-guard” when pressed about his 2020 election lies by host Steve Inskeep.
“Instead of listening to Trump’s answers mouth agape with no pushback” a la the Fox & Friends hosts, “Inskeep came prepared with basic facts to debunk Trump’s claims, and Trump clearly had no idea how to handle it,” said Meyers. “For starters, he didn’t even seem to know the details about how the interview was going to work,” asking Inskeep at the start if the interview was live (it was pre-taped).
“He’s a former president calling into a well-known news program and he acts like he just got stopped on the street by Jay Leno,” Meyers joked.
The interview came to an abrupt end when Trump hung up as Inskeep pressed the former president on his lies about the 2020 election.
“You know it’s bad when Donald Trump, who will drone on endlessly for as long as you let him, willingly ends an interview before it’s supposed to be over,” Meyers noted. “When these deranged lies are subjected to even a modicum of scrutiny they collapse because they’re absurd on their face.”
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel also lamented “another virus” on the rise: “That big orange golfer who used to run the country.”
In an interview with rightwing media company OAN, Trump confirmed he’d had the Covid booster and called Republican lawmakers who refuse to say they’ve been vaccinated “gutless”.
It was a thinly veiled barb at Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who stumbled over a question about his booster status on Fox News last weekend.
DeSantis is expected to run for the Republican nomination for president in 2024, “and you know that makes Trump crazy”, said Kimmel. “Trump desperately wants credit for developing the vaccines, because he should want credit, but the dummies who follow him boo him when he says he got the vaccine.
“And then you have characters like DeSantis who wants to have it both ways – he obviously got the booster but he doesn’t want to admit he got it,” Kimmel continued. “Which makes Trump, who did admit it, look like a wuss to the gators and chewing tobacco crowd. I mean, imagine being called gutless by Captain Bone Spurs.”