Monday was “a big night for weird old rich guys with no friends”, said Stephen Colbert on Tuesday’s Late Show, as Donald Trump returned to X, formerly Twitter, for an interview with its CEO, Elon Musk. Trump has only posted once on the platform since he was banned on 8 January 2021, in the wake of the Capitol attack. “But here’s the thing about Trump doing anything on Twitter now: it just reminds people of the awful reason he was banned to begin with,” said Colbert.
“It’s like getting a party invitation that says, come celebrate! When? Tuesday. Where? Mason Park. Why? Because I’m finally allowed within 200 yards of a school again!”
Due to some “hilarious” technical difficulties with the live stream, the interview began nearly 40 minutes late. “I’m sorry, I’m not waiting 40 minutes for anything,” said Colbert, “unless it’s for the bacon cheese fries from the Shake Shack at LaGuardia, in which case – yes, I will miss my flight.”
Once the interview – or, as Colbert called it, “this steaming crap sandwich” – started, Musk blamed the delay on a “massive distributed denial of service” attack on the site that “saturated all of our data lines”.
“Now if that sounds made up to you, good ear,” Colbert noted. Sources at X later confirmed to the Verge that such an attack never happened, and that there was a “99% chance” Musk was lying.
Musk assured that the “conversation” would be a softball interview, because as he said, “it’s hard to catch a vibe about someone if you just don’t hear them talk in a normal way.”
“OK, but what if they talk like their teeth suddenly grew three inches overnight and their cheeks are stuffed with salt-water taffy?” Colbert wondered, referring to numerous audience comparisons of Trump’s voice to the cartoon character Sylvester the Cat.
In other news, Barack Obama shared his yearly summer playlist, which includes Beyoncé’s Texas Hold ’Em, Billie Eilish’s Chihiro and Charli xcx’s 365 – “a song which, as I have been informed by my staff, is about doing cocaine”, said Colbert.
Obama also included the classic No Diggity by Blackstreet featuring Dr Dre and Queen Pen. “Very fitting,” Colbert joked, “because you’ll remember, under his administration, this country had historically low rates of Diggity.”
Seth Meyers
According to factcheckers, Trump made at least 20 false claims during his interview with Elon Musk, “starting with: it’s great to be here”, joked Seth Meyers on Late Night.
“However crazy you think it was, it was crazier,” he added of the interview. After listening to a borderline incoherent story about Vladimir Putin, Meyers could only ask: “Was Putin threatening to invade Ukraine, or put an ice-cream down your shirt? Also what’s going on with his voice? He sounds like a sugared-up kid on Halloween who won’t take out his plastic vampire teeth.
“I know you don’t want to be called weird, but you’ve gotta meet us halfway,” he teased.
During the interview, Trump praised Musk and said: “We can talk about tunnels and rockets and electric cars, so many things. And now you’re into the AI, and that’s going to be another beauty.”
“In fact, I think AI might’ve written that sentence,” said Meyers.
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