On Wednesday’s “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert was a little bummed that Trump still hasn’t been indicted — after all, it’s been almost two weeks since the disgraced former president claimed he would be. But the late night host cheered himself up by dunking on ex-vice president Mike Pence.
Then he turned his attention to a looming, Republican-caused crisis over the debt ceiling, but ultimately Colbert concluded that Americans are too “catastrophe’d out,” and it’ll take a lot worse to scare us.
After first noting there still is no arrest of Trump, Colbert said “there has been some movement on another one of the ex-president’s myriad criminal investigations, because a federal judge has ordered former vice president Mike Pence to appear in front of the Jan. 6 Special Counsel’s grand jury.”
This prompted big cheers from Colbert’s audience. “And the reason we know this is good for the country is because neither Pence nor the former president want it to happen,” Colbert responded.
The host ran down the bogus arguments Trump and Pence are using to try to get out of it — Pence is repeating an old argument first deployed by Dick Cheney — the false notion that the Vice President somehow exists as both part of the Executive Branch of the government and the Legislative. Colbert mocked Pence’s attempt to invoke this, saying “you can see it all in the new movie, every job everywhere all Mike Pence.”
Colbert noted that prosecutors want to know what Donald Trump told Mike Pence prior to Jan. 6 to pressure him to go along with the attempt to overturn the election. “We know some of the things the ex-president said to Pence, already about that plot, like, ‘If it gives you the power, why would you oppose it?” and, “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a p—y.”
“To which Pence replied, ‘What’s that?’” Colbert joked.
Colbert had plenty more Wednesday night, including an informative riff on the debt ceiling crisis. You can watch the entire “Late Show” monologue in the video above.