Stephen Colbert on Trump’s meltdown over polls and the Democrats beating him
By Matt Moore
Stephen Colbert dedicated his monologue to President Trump lashing out against polls suggesting things won’t go his way in 2020.
Back on American soil after his European trip, President Donald Trump seems to have turned his attention to his 2020 reelection campaign. A new poll indicating that half a dozen Democrats would beat him set off another tweetstorm that caught the attention of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
A report from Axios says that Trump would lose to a number of Democrats in a head-to-head election. That may not seem like a big deal considering there are over 20 Democratic candidates seeking the party’s nomination and we’re only in June of 2019. But the polls show that Trump would lose out to the biggest names in the Democratic field: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, and Pete Buttigieg.
When information like this comes out painting a bad picture for the president, he has a go-to method of responding: Twitter. Even when engagement with Trump’s account is declining, the president chose to use the platform to discredit the nature of polls and the information sources. This sort of outburst is the perfect material for a Late Show with Stephen Colbert monologue:
Former Vice President Joe Biden is Colbert’s first target before moving on to his favorite target. Biden’s campaign stop in Iowa gave Colbert a set up for jokes about Biden’s age, his habit of namedropping President Barack Obama, and the questionable decision to promise a cure for cancer IF elected. The further we go in to the campaign means the more that Biden is sure to find himself the butt of Colbert’s jokes.
Colbert moves on to (try) breaking down the president’s tweets explaining away how he could be down in the polls. The numbers are suppressed, fabricated, and nonexistent all in the span of two tweets. For the Late Show host, Trump is covering all his bases while revealing no plausible excuse for losing.
Colbert’s bit on trusting polls given what happened in 2016 is much more closer to the statements President Trump should be making. Knowing how the last election played out, he should probably ignore any data that comes out at this stage. But we know by now that Trump cannot let anything go that isn’t what he wants to hear.
President Trump seems to think that his is very, very popular in Europe given his comments about his speech there. Unfortunately, it is his popularity here in the U.S. that he needs to worry about going in to 2020. That means that more tweets are coming along with more monologues like this one from Stephen Colbert.