Stephen Colbert‘s The Late Show is airing live this week in conjunction with the Republican National Convention, but the CBS host opened Monday’ s incident with a prerecorded message putting down final weekend break’s killing try versus Donald Trump.
“The United States came close to a great tragedy on Saturday when at a political rally down in Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old gunman shot and nearly killed a former president and the man who today became the 2024 Republican nominee,” Colbert pointed out. “My immediate reaction when I saw this on Saturday was horror at what was unfolding, relief that Donald Trump had lived and, frankly, grief for my beautiful country — and then fresh horror, as we learned that attendees had also been shot, one of whom died at the rally.”
Colbert used this circumstance as cause for beginning his show, booked to become online recently, in a prerecorded sector coming from his work desk, however additionally pointed out, “I could just as easily start the show moaning on the floor, because how many times do we need to learn the lesson that violence has no role in our politics, that the entire objective of a democracy is to fight out our differences with — as the saying goes — a ballot, not a bullet.”
The entertainer after that pointed out a pal had actually texted him quickly after the capturing to claim, “How is this happening in America in 2024?”
“I understood his shock,” Colbert pointed out, “but I’m old enough that one of my earliest memories is sitting in a dark room with my sister watching my parents’ little black-and-white TV, and seeing Bobby Kennedy’s coffin on that slow train from New York down to Washington. And whether the result of extremist politics or mental illness, that violence is with us still — from the shooting of a GOP baseball practice that seriously injured Steve Scalise, to the plot to kidnap and kill Governor Gretchen Whitmer, to the hammer attack that nearly killed Paul Pelosi, to the horrors of Jan. 6, to this most recent attack.”
The multitude happened to claim that Sunday’s opponent, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was actually “someone barely out of boyhood who reportedly donated to a Democratic group in 2021, then registered as a Republican that same year,” keeping in mind that “we may never understand his motivation, nor is that necessarily our job.”
Colbert completed his message, like a lot of others this weekend break, with a contact us to “reject violence and violent rhetoric in this time of crisis.”
“Not only is violence evil, it is useless,” Colbert pointed out. “As I quoted [science fiction writer Isaac Asimov] when Representative Steve Scalise was shot, ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’ Violence, or even calls for violence, invalidate any ideas.”
Colbert’s show will definitely cover recently’s RNC in Milwaukee carefully, as well as carry out the very same for the Democratic Celebration’s meeting in Chicago following month. “These conventions will be about the candidates who are nominated, but they’re really about the ideas that these two candidates represent and the future America they want to lead us to,” he pointed out. “In the wake of this attack on Saturday, many Americans on both sides of the aisle, from President Biden to Speaker Johnson, are calling on all this to change how we see each other, how we treat each other, how we talk to each other. That may or may not happen, but those conflicting ideas will remain the same. So this week, we’re going to do our best to talk about those ideas, the people who represent those ideas, and many other things, with guests and who knows, if we’re lucky, maybe some fart jokes.”
