President Donald Trump has long complained that The Late Show host Stephen Colbert can’t stop picking on him every single night. Well, according to Colbert, Trump wasn’t his first choice in presidents or targets.
When Colbert succeeded David Letterman on The Late Show in September, 2015, he looked forward to a late-night gig that wouldn’t be defined by conservative politics like his first hit The Colbert Report, in which he played a parodical right-wing commentator in the style of Bill O’Reilly. At the time, many of Colbert’s fans still considered Trump to be an embarrassing side-show whose political career would soon be smothered in the crib by the cold, gray, inevitable tide of Hillary Clinton. Instead, the Trump campaign turned into a decade-long nightmare for the nation and its late-night writers.
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Ever since the beginning of Trump’s first term, late-night comedy fans have been complaining that the wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s outrageous antics and frightening power-grabs has lessened the laugh-worthiness of The Late Show and its contemporaries. Well, in a new profile for GQ, Colbert admitted that it he didn’t particularly enjoy becoming CBS’ top anti-Trump comedian – although getting fired from that gig is admittedly worse.
When asked whether he enjoys getting/having to mock Trump on national television every night, Colbert said simply, “No. I am grateful to be able to react,” though he admits that “it’s a selfish endeavor.” However, Colbert said that he enjoys the job itself, even if certain subjects wear thin after a while. “I get a lot out of going out there and doing jokes about what happened today, no matter what happened today.”
Colbert even said that the golden years of his tenure on The Late Show were the ones when he was the least concerned about Trump being the top story every night, saying, “I enjoyed going and doing the jokes and being with the audience when he wasn’t in office. I think we went three years without saying his name. I don’t think I said his name for three years. And if he made news, we would just come up with some nickname.” Colbert concluded, “No, I love not talking about him.”
Nevertheless, Colbert sees his anti-Trump comedy of the last ten years as something of a necessary evil. “I know how to titrate poison,” Colbert stated, “You titrate poison with your own jokes and your own editorial stance on it and how you push back on what you think is the lie that is telling you this is vitamins, but there’s no doubt that it’s poisonous.”
When that poison finally seeped into the bloodstream of Paramount this past summer, Colbert and The Late Show paid for their repeated targeting of the president, even if Colbert himself never particularly enjoyed using Trump as a punching bag. Still, Colbert says that he’s sad to lose the opportunity to make nightly attempts to turn the Trump Administration into comedy, saying, “I will miss every aspect of my job other than wearing makeup.”
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