On a recent night in late-night television, what began as a familiar monologue about shutdown politics and immigration quickly turned into something closer to a televised intervention on the Trump era itself.

Stephen Colbert, seated at his desk, walked his audience through the surreal news cycle: a government shutdown colliding with an escalating immigration crisis, talk of military action near Venezuela, and Donald Trump firing off posts at a frenetic pace, insisting that Democrats were to blame for everything from airport chaos to oil prices. Then Colbert pivoted to a different kind of resistance — one that arrived not in a speech, but on a canvas.

Enter Jim Carrey, the comic actor who has, over the past decade, quietly become one of Trump’s most persistent artistic critics. In Colbert’s retelling, Carrey is no longer just the star of “Ace Ventura” or “The Mask.” He is the painter who turned his unease about the country’s direction into more than 100 blistering pieces of political art — and who once used a network talk show to showcase that work to millions.

Carrey’s paintings, displayed on screen for the audience, were neither subtle nor polite. One showed Trump mid-scream, mouth wide open, the chaos of his rhetoric rendered as a visual howl. Another depicted the former president eating an ice cream cone — an exaggerated riff on reports that Trump received a double scoop while others got only one — while tweaking his own nipple, a grotesque image that went viral when Carrey first posted it online. Carrey had even pitched one screaming portrait, he recalled, to the Smithsonian as a formal presidential likeness.

The segment on Colbert’s show stitched that history together with the present. Carrey’s earlier work — including a widely shared portrait of Robert Mueller “squeezing” Trump, and a caustic depiction of Sarah Huckabee Sanders as a “so-called Christian whose only purpose in life is to lie for the wicked” — was presented as a kind of visual diary of the Trump years: the bans, the lies, the family separations, the constant churn of outrage.

But Colbert’s program was not just looking backward. Intercut with the art was a broader indictment of the current political moment. Clips of Trump promoting conspiracy theories, boasting about his own imagination and inventing a shadowy “Antifa” superstructure, sat alongside video of MAGA-aligned members of Congress calling for more aggressive action abroad and fewer immigrants at home. One Republican lawmaker declared that a United States in which one in six residents is foreign born is “not sustainable,” while another openly mused about invading Venezuela and turning its oil over to American companies.

A Democratic guest, Representative Jimmy Gomez of California, described going to work each day among colleagues who talk about war with the casual confidence of a television pundit. He warned that proposals to invade Venezuela could backfire into instability and mass displacement, and argued that Trump-era plans to dramatically expand the powers of immigration enforcement amounted to building a national police force untethered from accountability.

In that context, Carrey’s paintings — some depicting immigrant children separated from their parents, others imagining Trump and his allies descending into a hellish crypt — were framed less as celebrity provocation and more as an attempt to document what he saw as a moral emergency. On Colbert’s show, Carrey once said that he wanted to be “a lighthouse warning people they were headed for the rocks,” a line the host echoed as he contrasted the paintings with the administration’s efforts to downplay or normalize its most controversial policies.

The broadcast also revisited Carrey’s stint as Joe Biden on “Saturday Night Live” in 2020, playing the then-candidate opposite Alec Baldwin’s Trump. Those sketches, critics noted at the time, were less about mimicry and more about capturing the exhaustion of a country worn down by constant disruption. In Colbert’s telling, Carrey’s decision to walk away from both the role and his Trump paintings — he now paints mangoes, which he calls symbols of abundance and sweetness — was not surrender but a sign that he had said all he felt he could.

What made the segment feel unusual, even in an era of politicized late-night television, was its blend of humor and archiving. Colbert ribbed Trump’s fixation on ratings and imagined the former president rage-watching from a residence stocked with fast food, yet he also treated Carrey’s work, and the broader backlash it represented, as material that future historians might consult when trying to understand the texture of this period.

The response online was swift. Clips of Carrey describing Trump as “Orange Julius Caesar,” and Colbert marveling at the extremity of some Republican rhetoric, spread quickly across social platforms. Supporters hailed the segment as a reminder that resistance to Trump did not come only from politicians and pundits, but from comedians and artists willing to risk backlash. Critics dismissed it as coastal liberal performance.

For Colbert and Carrey, though, the stakes seemed less about scoring partisan points than about insisting that what happened be recorded. “Sometimes the most powerful weapon against corruption isn’t a tweet or a speech,” the host said near the end of the piece. “Sometimes it’s just an artist with a brush who refuses to look away.”