Stephen Colbert revealed Tuesday how “The Late Show” subtly counted down the time left in Donald Trump’s presidency for four years.
The number of days left in Trump’s first term was, before the coronavirus pandemic forced the show into remote production, projected daily onto the dome of the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York, where the show was set, explained Colbert.
“We counted it down every night for four long painful years,” he said, before gleefully declaring: “Tonight, the number on the dome has counted down to one.”
In his final monologue of the Trump era, Colbert named “the weirdest thing” that he felt summed up Trump’s time in office ― involving the outgoing president boasting about a rich friend and “something that sounded like a sex party on a boat” during a 2017 address to the Boy Scouts.
“You didn’t exactly know where he was going or what he was talking about, but it made you feel dirty and you knew it was not good for children,” cracked Colbert, who also paid tribute to the American public for voting Trump out of office.
“Throughout all of the craziness and threats to everything we hold sacred, there was one hero who kept our country together,” he said. “And that’s you. The American people. For all of his dangerous assaults on democracy, in the end democracy kicked his ass all the way back to Florida. And in this case, I for one will never be sick of winning.”
Watch Colbert’s full monologue here: