Stephen Colbert had a good laugh at Fox News’ “The Five” on Wednesday night, after a guest host got pretty mixed up on her historical timeline and suggested President Harry S. Truman tried to buy Greenland almost two decades before he was born.
The discussion itself came about as Rosanna Scotto and the rest of the panel discussed Donald Trump’s sudden determination to annex Greenland (even going so far as to send his son to scout out the territory), and the reactions to it.
As the conversation progressed, Scotto argued that Greenland has been of interest to the U.S. before, specifically saying that President Truman tried to buy it back in 1867.
“Yes! President Harry Truman tried to buy Greenland in 1867 — a mere 20 years before he was born,” Colbert mocked.
Indeed, Truman wasn’t born until 1884. But Scotto’s general premise is partly true; Truman’s administration did quietly make a pitch to buy Greenland. But that didn’t happen until 1946 — and wasn’t even public knowledge until 1991 — because Truman didn’t even become president until 1945.
Colbert then joked that Truman wasn’t the only one who tried to make impossible deals happen, listing a few others: “FDR also tried to buy Greenland in 2004, by sending his vice president the Erie Canal! A Democrat! But luckily that deal was halted by President Genghis Khan two years before the big bang.”
You can watch Stephen Colbert’s full monologue in the video, above.
