Stephen Colbert is really mad.
It is not easy to push him into being mean. He generally stands for things like 'read more books' and 'get along with each other'. Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a reality where Colbert is a Jesuit scholar. Somewhere else is a timeline where he's the television personality who accidentally won his bid for President. I for one would like to apply for a transfer, right now.
Colbert has a reputation. I've started to wonder if people who interview him are contractually obligated to describe him as 'the nicest man on Earth' because they all basically do. When he accidentally acquired an internet army at his old show, he put them to work alternately getting random shit named after him and organizing thousands, if not millions, of dollars for various charitable causes. After testifying before Congress on behalf of immigrant workers, he was asked why he would do that, and stammered before quoting Matthew ('the least of my brothers' usw.), I suspect because it had never occurred to him that anyone would ever not know the reason behind defending other human beings. I find it prognostic that the first time he dropped the idiot pundit persona on camera, in front of his core audience, was on Jon Stewart's last episode of The Daily Show, where Colbert cornered his friend behind the anchor desk and said nice things at him until he cried. He teaches Sunday school. He shows up to work on Ash Wednesday with a cross smudged on his forehead. His Instagram is full of pictures of his dog.
I have no way of knowing what celebrities are really like at home. (Well, we all know what Colbert's like in one very specific corner of his study now, thanks to coronovirus, but you get what I mean.) If he is not the R-rated potty-mouthed Mr Rogers all us grown-ups need right now, then he is absolutely dedicated to playing that man on TV. And the last time he was that determined to keep up a character, he held it for nine and a half years.
This man does not want 45 on his show anymore. He is afraid that he would say something he very, very much wants to say to Donald J Trump, but that he would regret having said to a sitting President. And just to remind you, this is what he was willing to say to a President who was sitting not just in the sense of "incumbent", but also in the sense of "two chairs to his right at the banquet table".
[And note also what he was willing to say on national TV. I have a feeling there was a substantial cut at about the 10 minute mark, where his prop disappears, and given the later monologue I also have a feeling it was a callback to the other very famous bit involving Colbert and a banana.
He later apologized to the audience if his phrasing seemed unnecessarily crude or offensive to anyone other than Donald Trump.]
Historically, men who have gotten away with egregious abuses of power have often done so on the strength of character witnesses. When allegations start coming out, so too do their friends, other powerful men who crow 'no friend of mine could ever do such a thing'. Their voices, already loud, are amplified by repetition, and eventually there comes a point where the victims have shouted themselves hoarse for so long with so little result that they give up. And so the cycle continues.
When Les Moonves, then-emperor of CBS and Colbert's boss' boss, was the subject of accusations of sexual harassment and assault, Colbert sat down at his desk and very solidly bit the hand that greenlit his show in the first place. He made the critical point that just because someone has been good to you, doesn't mean they've always been good to everyone, and accountability means nothing if you only enforce it on people you don't like.
As far as I can tell, he doesn't think Trump has ever been good to anybody in his life. And he's probably right. Colbert's fanbase is big enough that his support would be valuable, which makes his derision equally notable. It's easy to ignore anger from the perpetually self-righteous; screaming about everything is functionally the same as saying nothing, as the nuances of emphasis are lost. The ire of a kindly man is a different thing entirely.
[CBS conspicuously failed to fire him for taking a chunk out of Moonves. In fairness, the person whose job it is to deal with content complaints from the network is usually the executive producer. There are four or five of them on the Late Show, but Colbert is one, and another one is Jon Stewart, who is semi-retired and often has literally nothing better to do than win arguments of that ilk.]
The Late Show has lately morphed from nighttime entertainment to CBS Presents: The 'You're Not Crazy' Hour, Hosted By Stephen Colbert. Our leadership is so useless that the job of giving inspirational speeches has fallen to TV comedians. I want George Carlin back. Probably so do Jon Stewart and all his comedy children.
I am pretty sure Colbert will be on the air complaining about this stuff until either the problem is solved, or he is arrested for doing it. If that day comes, I've no doubt he would go peacefully but not quietly. Then someone would tell Stewart and the internet, possibly even in that order, and the media shit would hit the fan.
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