Perhaps no one anticipated the kind of groundless conspiratorial rhetoric President Donald Trump has engaged with throughout his single term in office better than Stephen Colbert.
On his satirical Comedy Central series The Colbert Report, which spoofed Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show and numerous other conservative media figures of the time, Colbert played the role of a right-wing buffoon. His character explained his ethos in the series’s very first episode, when he defined a concept he coined as “truthiness”: “I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart. And that’s exactly what’s pulling our country apart today,” Colbert said in 2005. “Because face it, folks, we are a divided nation. Not between Democrats and Republicans, or conservatives and liberals, or tops and bottoms. No. We are divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.”
These days—as President Trump’s outright refusal of reality has led to not just his administration’s failed response to the coronavirus pandemic but weeks of baseless attacks on an election he decisively lost to President-Elect Joe Biden—the “Colbert” character no longer feels like satire. At least, that’s what former President Barack Obama told Colbert on Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show.
After Obama discussed Trump’s dismissive attitude toward science and basic social distancing, Colbert wondered if the election might have turned out differently had Trump expressed some empathy or awareness.
“It would have been good politics as well, yes,” Obama said. “I think that that is a measure of how detached from reality and how embedded ideological and conspiratorial thinking has become, where you’re doing it even when it’s to your disadvantage, right?”
He added, “In your original show, right? You’re satirizing a certain attitude, but you never thought that folks would actually start believing it.”
“I did not know I was a prophet. I thought I was a comedian,” Colbert said in response.
“You couldn’t make up some of the stuff that you’re seeing,” Obama replied. “And it is to the detriment of the country, but, as you said, it also runs contrary to what would have been smart politics if the Republicans wanted to maintain the White House.”
That didn’t happen, of course. But it hasn’t stopped Trump and other Republicans from sowing major doubt on the electoral process. A Politico poll taken earlier this month found that 70 percent of Republicans didn’t think the election was fair, despite statements to the contrary from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
For Obama, the push through the looking glass is a major problem. “Now it’s no longer even strategic,” he said of Republican policies. “You’re drinking your own Kool-Aid in a way that I think is troublesome.”
It’s an issue, the former president said, that Biden must find a way to overcome while in office. “Joe Biden is going to have to figure out how to puncture that information bubble that, not just Republican officials, but a sizable portion of voters are in right now,” he said.