On Wednesday, the Ad Council debuted a pair of ads featuring former U.S. presidents urging Americans to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Of course, while Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama appeared, there was one notable ex-president missing: Donald Trump.
That’s no surprise, considering Trump attempted to overthrow the government back in January and was directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and giving the U.S. the highest COVID-19 death rate among developed nations, and the most total COVID deaths in the world.
But on Thursday’s episode of “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert imagined what it would have been like if Trump had decided to appear in the ads — and it’s exactly as horrible as you’d imagine.
In the clip, we see Obama, Carter, Bush and Clinton deliver their lines. But interspersed are recordings of Trump sounding just as tone-deaf and indifferent as he was when he was president.
For instance, the “Late Show” video uses a clip from May 2020, when Trump said, “this is gonna go away without a vaccine.” Of course, we all know that didn’t happen. Instead, we went from 67,146 COVID deaths on the day Trump made that absurd claim to 402,803 on the day he left office.
Next, the clip assembled a quote from several different recordings so it sounded like Trump said, “I want chocolate cake,” something we can only imagine he would say in real life.
Then came another real quote from Trump. After the point in the ad where former President Clinton says Americans have “suffered enough damage,” we see a clip from December 2019 when Trump complained, “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times.”
Finally, in another fake quote assembled from real audio, Trump appears to say, “The vaccine was tested on my son, Eric.”
See the full “Late Show” spoof ad below.
On #LSSC tonight: All of the living ex-presidents are on the same page about the vaccine, except one. pic.twitter.com/xTNR0RihHp
— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) March 12, 2021