Stephen Colbert opened The Late Show on Thursday – a year after the day since COVID-19 was officially considered a pandemic – playing a slightly altered version of the new PSA with four former presidents.
In addition to clips of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, each promoting vaccines, this included Donald Trump predicting that the virus would magically “go away” without the need for a vaccine.
In reality, the 45th president was nowhere to be seen in the ad, which debuted online Thursday morning. After dusting off his impression of W. to make fun of Bush for choosing a baseball game as the thing he most wants to do now that he has been vaccinated, Colbert addressed the living ex-president who is visibly missing.
“Perhaps his invitation was lost in the mail … because he destroyed the postal service!” the host joked. “The old 45 was left out of the POTUS PSA party, but he released his own statement about the vaccine.”
From there, he read aloud the “statement” that Trump would have preferred to tweet: “I hope everyone will remember when they are getting the COVID-19 vaccine (often called the China Virus), that if I were not president, you wouldn’t have that beautiful ‘photo’ for 5 years, at best, and you probably wouldn’t have it at all. I hope you all remember! “
“First of all, this is incredibly sad,” replied Colbert. “Second, pathetic. Third, how did we discover this statement? He can’t tweet these things! Did he just print and staple on telephone poles in Palm Beach? He might as well have just released ‘Ex-prez will take the credit and teach you guitar!’ “
“We banned him from Twitter,” he concluded. “Can we ban it from paper? It is possible?”