Wednesday night’s Late Show brought viewers another glimpse at what Stephen Colbert was up to in Cleveland earlier this week before he returned to New York for a series of live shows to cover the Republican National Convention.
“I had the chance to go down to Cleveland this week and actually meet the delegates who nominated Donald Trump,” Colbert said from his desk. “And I’ve got to say, they’re good people who deserve a better candidate.”
With that, we were transported to Cleveland for an old-fashioned field piece that recalled some of Colbert’s classic work on The Daily Show. The host began by asking a series of delegates if Trump was their first choice in the Republican primary, to which he received a series of “no’s.” But there were others who preferred Trump even to the “reanimated corpse” of Ronald Reagan.
When Colbert had Trump on his show last fall, he asked the then-long-shot candidate to guess whether certain quotes belonged to him or the “Stephen Colbert” character from The Colbert Report. This time, he played a game of “Trump or False” with delegates, making them attempt to determine whether particularly outrageous statements were actually uttered by the man they were about to nominate for president.
One man couldn’t believe that Trump did, in fact, say, “My fingers are long and beautiful. It has been well documented, as are various other parts of my body.” As Colbert told him, “Your candidate did talk about his penis.”
Another was sure Trump never said, “I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words.” But he too was wrong.
Colbert presented a female Trump supporter with this line, “I named my dog Megyn Kelly because she’s stupid and bad at her job,” which certainly sounded like something the candidate may have said at point. But she was right to guess that that “has to be false.”
