Stephen Colbert torched Vice President JD Vance’s thin defense of President Donald Trump’s ill-advised Jesus post.
On Sunday night, the 79-year-old president posted an AI-generated photograph of himself posing as Jesus Christ, hours after he had started a public feud with the pope. The post angered those in Trump’s loyal MAGA fanbase, leading the president to delete the picture and prompting the vice president to leap to his boss’s defense.
In the wake of the backlash, Vance, 41, told Fox News, “I think the president was posting a joke, and of course he took it down because he recognized that a lot of people weren’t understanding his humor in that case.”
On Tuesday night’s episode of The Late Show, Colbert ripped into “scornful hamster JD Vance” for his attempt to do “damage control” and “staunch the bleeding.”
The late-night host responded sarcastically, “Yeah, it was just humor. God humor. The Bible’s full of it!”
“I mean, remember what Moses said to Pharaoh? ‘Tell my people joke.’”
Vance, a converted Catholic, offered other excuses for Trump’s post, saying that he “likes to mix it up on social media.”
“I actually think that’s one of the good things about this president–he’s not filtered,” he continued. “He actually reaches out directly to the people.”
The vice president also defended Trump’s bizarre social media attack on Pope Leo XIV, while simultaneously saying the current administration has a “good relationship with the Vatican.”
“It’s a good thing that the pope is advocating for the things he cares about,” the vice president, who will soon release a book about his journey to faith, said.
The Chicago-born pope, 70, has been critical of the president’s foreign policy and made an impassioned call for peace amid Trump’s war in Iran.
Vance told host Bret Baier, “The president has the prerogative to set American foreign policy, he’s got the prerogative to set American immigration policy. He has to look out for the interests of the United States of America, and that inevitably means that when the Vatican comments on issues of public policy, sometimes there’s going to be agreement, of course, and sometimes there’s going to be disagreement.”
“In some cases, it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what’s going on in the Catholic Church. But when they’re in conflict, they’re in conflict. I don’t worry about it too much.”
As anger against the president mounted following his commentary, Trump backtracked on his post and claimed that he wasn’t depicting himself as Jesus, but rather as a doctor.
Colbert mocked the president’s questionable explanation, saying, “Given the fact that he either posted a picture of himself as Jesus or he doesn’t know what doctors look like, it’s not surprising that even former allies and advisers are describing him as a ‘lunatic’ and ‘clearly insane.’”
“Then again,” the late-night host concluded. “It’s possible he’s not insane. He might just be the antichrist.”
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