Stephen Colbert calls out Tariff Man Trump’s lies on Christmas shopping

Once again Stephen Colbert called President Donald Trump “Tariff Man,” this time for delaying tariffs to save Christmas shopping.

We are only halfway through August but people are already talking about Christmas. Stephen Colbert spent his monologue calling out President Donald Trump for backtracking on his tariff plans in an effort to “save” Christmas shopping.

President Trump announced that taxes on Chinese imports would be delayed until Dec. 15. The delay is designed to let retailers get goods into the country for the Christmas shopping season without doing too much damage to profits. This is all fine and good if it wasn’t following months of Trump promising that China would be paying for those losses, not Americans.

This contradiction caught the attention of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. As obsessed as Trump seems with tariffs, Stephen Colbert is just as obsessed with arguing every tariff plan introduced by the White House. Colbert has dubbed Trump “Tariff Man” and called out the president’s hypocrisy over tariffs in the past.

So Colbert wasn’t exactly buying Trump’s plan to “save” Christmas by pushing back implementing the tariffs. The Late Show host came to Wednesday night’s monologue with the footage to back up his criticism.

The trade war with China has already impacted the stock market. It doesn’t help that a tweet from Trump can have just as much influence as an actual policy or negotiation. No doubt the “inverted yield curve” will continue to make headlines, especially once everyone like Stephen Colbert figure out exactly what that means.

Colbert then shows five different clips of Trump claiming that China is paying for the tariffs, not Americans. The ability of The Late Show to put together these highlight packages has always been a strength of the show. They not only support whatever case Colbert is making but they are always presented in a way to perfectly set up the punchline.

Colbert shows how Trump is covering his bases by delaying the tariffs. He can continue to say that China will pay for them, probably using the same “one way or another” argument he used to say Mexico would fund the border wall. But he ensures that the Christmas shopping season won’t be derailed “just in case.”

So it looks like you can put hockey gloves, fake beards, and processed frog meat back on your Christmas list. President Trump has made sure that there will be plenty of those around the tree this year.