It seems that famed journalist Bob Woodward has encapsulated all the madness of the first year and a half of Donald Trump’s time as president in his new book “Fear: Trump in the White House” — with stories that successfully managed to simultaneously stretch credulity and sound perfectly believable that it’s been hard to talk about anything else this week.
On Wednesday night’s episode of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” the show’s cold open featured a sketch that parodied the kids’ show “Reading Rainbow,” in which the kids discuss “Fear” in a way that, well, sounds about right.
“When you grow up, do you want to be the president? Well, this book shows that anybody can do it,” a young girl said to introduce the book in the same earnest way that the kids in real episodes of “Reading Rainbow” do it. “It’s called ‘Fear’ by Bob Woodward. In it, an ogre made of cheese runs the country without knowing anything about how to do it! It’s scary and funny and sad all at the same time.”
From there, we got a series of other kids dropping quip after quip at the expense of Donald Trump.
Kid 2: “My favorite part was watching the republic crumble before our eyes.”
Kid 3: “I like the part where the president ordered the assassination of Bashar al-Assad, but then his generals ignored him.”
Kid 4: “Don’t read it before bed. You’ll get nightmares.”
Kid 5: “And don’t read it in the day, because you’ll get daymares.”
The skit concluded with another kid teasing the next book the fake episode of “Reading Rainbow” would discuss.
“Next up, ‘If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.’ I wish that mouse was president,” the kid said dryly.
Colbert spent a lot of time talking about the Woodward book in his monologue on Wednesday night, something that will likely continue through the rest of the week and into next — Woodward is scheduled to chat with Colbert on “The Late Show” on Monday.
You can watch the full “Reading Rainbow” bit from Wednesday’s episode of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” in the video embedded at the top of this post.