Stephen Colbert on Trump’s ‘strange and incoherent’ national emergency speech

Stephen Colbert did his best to deconstruct how President Donald Trump claimed both a victory and an emergency over his border wall.

We are a few days in to the national emergency that President Donald Trump declared in response to the apparent crisis at the southern border. His press conference was a confusing and scattered performance. It was just the sort of thing that attracts the attention of Stephen Colbert.

Politics aside, we now come to expect that with any big action taken by Trump there will be an entertaining response from the late night world. Saturday Night Live got to take the first crack at it. The show’s cold open was so-so by its own standards. However, it clearly touched a nerve with the president who took time out of his emergency management plans to tweet about the show.

Monday night was a chance for the weekly late night shows to get their shots in, too. Stephen Colbert typically leads the ratings and the biggest reason for that has been his all-in approach to attacking President Trump. You could argue that Trump is just providing Colbert with too much material for him not to dedicate each Late Show monologue to the president.

So just like everyone tuned in to hear Colbert’s take on the government shutdown or the latest news from the Russia investigation, all eyes were on last night’s Late Show. It was clear that in the aftermath of the national emergency declaration, Colbert was working on his monologue while President Trump used his time to golf.

The press conference seemed to sum up everything that Stephen Colbert finds infuriating, comical, and ridiculous about Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s fitting considering the border wall has been Trump’s big promise since he first decided he wanted to be president.

Trump’s speech featured his classic rambling style of delivery that usually comes out during a campaign rally. Colbert loves these because as he did last night, he doesn’t have to stretch too far to make Trump sound incoherent and disjointed.

Next up was Trump contradicting Trump. This is a popular point even outside of The Late Show. There seems to be a past tweet from President Trump that is critical of everything he is doing now in office. When the issue of a national emergency goes to the courts, it won’t be good that Trump is on record saying he “didn’t need to do this.”

Then it was on to something we’ve never seen from a president before. Trump’s presidency has been full of “firsts” but nobody could have expected how long he went on in that sing-song voice. Nothing hammers home the severity of a national emergency like a president half-singing about legal procedures.

Things wrapped up with a couple more of President Trump’s greatest hits. He criticized President Barack Obama while also making it fairly obvious that he was fabricating their conversation about a war with North Korea. He then boasted about being up for a Nobel Peace Prize. All in all the national emergency press conference had everything that has made Trump a target for Stephen Colbert’s comedy. It may be the only part of the whole thing that made sense.