Stephen Colbert teases Trump for inauguration crowd size

Stephen Colbert teases Trump for inauguration crowd size

Stephen Colbert opened Friday’s episode of The Late Show with a message to anyone who had just awaken from a coma: “Donald Trump has been sworn in as President of the United States,” he said. “We’re just as confused as you are and we’ve been awake this whole time.”

Teasing the president for the length of his tie (“He looks like the underbelly of a rainbow trout”), Colbert mocked Trump’s inauguration ceremony and his urge to post things on Twitter. “So that it’s: Donald Trump is president. He knows the launch codes. And he hasn’t tweeted them yet, so… so far, so good,” Colbert joked.

The host also highlighted portions of Trump’s inauguration speech, which included the president running down a litany of negative claims about the state of America. “Like Lincoln huffing paint thinner, this stirring orator invoked an inspiring picture of the country he now leads,” Colbert joked, before playing clips of Trump’s speech.

“We get it! We get it, the country is a turd storm!” Colbert said. “You said that during the campaign, you can stop now. He knows he won, right? Putin must have told him. Give it up!”

Colbert added, “The inauguration, of course, also included the time-honored the tradition of talking about how the former president sucks while Obama and Biden had to sit there as helpless as a damp Russian mattress.”

During his lengthy monologue, Colbert also teased Trump for the size of his inauguration crowd, which lagged far behind what Barack Obama saw in 2009.

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“He’s already getting Americans back to work,” Colbert joked before showing the photo above. “All I can figure is that nobody could get the day off; they’re all working. Either that’s a lot of empty space or that crowd is even whiter than I thought.”

He added, “There were big empty spaces in the crowd, or as Trump called them, ‘the most least people ever. The greatest, most fantastic lack of attendance in American history. You’re not going to believe how many people didn’t show up.'”