In an era when late-night comedy has become a parallel form of political commentary, two of its most prominent hosts joined forces — at least in spirit — to turn Donald J. Trump into a sprawling, serialized punchline.
On a recent night of programming, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher each devoted extended segments to Mr. Trump, stitching together footage of his public remarks, his social media posts and his increasingly theatrical public persona. The result, once clipped and shared online, resembled a coordinated takedown: a cross-network roast that treated the former president less as a party leader than as the central character in a long-running absurdist drama.
The ostensible hook was familiar: Thanksgiving, the annual turkey-pardoning ceremony and the political symbolism that now clings to even the lightest White House ritual. In archival clips, Mr. Trump riffs on the names of the birds — “Gobble” and “Waddle” — and jokes that he might have called them “Chuck and Nancy” before insisting he would never pardon the Democratic leaders. The material might once have qualified as standard-issue partisan ribbing. In the hands of Mr. Colbert and Mr. Maher, it became Exhibit A in a broader indictment of what they portray as Mr. Trump’s compulsive need to turn every occasion into a grievance.
The comedians seized on the language and the posture. Mr. Maher imagined Republicans as “state stenographers” scribbling down Mr. Trump’s every aside, likening the scene to the choreographed adulation around North Korea’s ruler. Mr. Colbert, in a separate segment, described the Thanksgiving performance as part of a “tantrum of the opera,” suggesting that even a ceremonial pardon becomes, in Mr. Trump’s hands, another opportunity to nurse old feuds.
From there, the monologues widened in scope. Mr. Maher walked his audience through recent proposals to rename Washington Dulles International Airport after Mr. Trump and to add his likeness to Mount Rushmore. Each suggestion was treated as a setup line. “Like Lincoln,” Mr. Maher deadpanned, “he’s not really helping the theater scene in Washington.”
Mr. Colbert, for his part, zeroed in on reports that Mr. Trump had taken an unusually hands-on role in overseeing renovations at the Kennedy Center, complete with boasts about columns saved from corrosion. The host framed it as part of a pattern: the former president inserting his brand — literal and figurative — into institutions that once prided themselves on a certain distance from day-to-day politics.
The tone throughout was unmistakably harsh. Both hosts returned repeatedly to Mr. Trump’s fixation on his appearance and his weight, contrasting his own insults of political rivals with the image he appears eager to project. They reviewed his habit of hanging his mug shot outside the Oval Office and of surrounding himself with aides whose nicknames sound like caricatures. At one point, Mr. Maher likened the effort to a “high-budget performance staged in a hall of mirrors,” in which every reflection is slightly distorted but always flattering.
Beneath the jokes lay a more pointed argument about power, accountability and what happens when a former president continues to dominate the national conversation through spectacle rather than policy. The monologues revisited Mr. Trump’s past association with Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, and noted the near-unanimous congressional vote to release long-withheld files related to Mr. Epstein’s activities. They juxtaposed Mr. Trump’s expressions of sympathy for the “family” of a wealthy associate with proposals that would cut food assistance for low-income Americans.
In one sequence, Mr. Maher contrasted those priorities with a familiar refrain: “Everything he touches dies,” he said, citing reports of sagging ticket sales at the Kennedy Center since Mr. Trump installed himself as chairman of its board. The line, borrowed from a well-known anti-Trump conservative, drew a knowing reaction from his audience and has since circulated widely online.
If the perspective of the segments was unmistakably critical, the style was layered. Mr. Colbert leaned heavily on theatrical imagery, describing Mr. Trump as a “cardboard cutout in a hurricane” and his public statements as a “roller coaster of emotional swings” punctuated by late-night social media posts. Mr. Maher favored the language of farce, likening Mr. Trump’s approach to policy to “a buffet where nothing pairs well, yet everything is taken anyway.”
Taken together, the routines underscored how fully Mr. Trump has become embedded in the grammar of late-night television — not simply as a frequent target, but as a kind of narrative engine. Jokes about his efforts to rename an NFL stadium after himself, his public feuds with governors and his claims about crime rates in Washington, D.C., were presented less as discrete controversies than as chapters in an ongoing serialized story of “misplaced confidence and runaway gestures.”
For Mr. Trump’s supporters, the double-barreled critique will read as further proof that the entertainment establishment remains aligned against him — and by extension against them. They are likely to dismiss the focus on pardoned turkeys, mug shots, royal scandals and social media boasts as a distraction from what they view as policy accomplishments and legitimate grievances.
For his critics, the segments offered something closer to catharsis: a chance to watch two seasoned performers translate a week of presidential news into an extended, mocking narrative that feels, at times, more emotionally satisfying than any official accountability process.
What remains uncertain is how much such comedy changes minds. Colbert and Maher both attract audiences that skew liberal and politically engaged; their joint roasting is more likely to reinforce existing impressions of Mr. Trump than to reshape them. Yet in a media environment where late-night clips can outrun traditional news reports, the imagery they created — of a former president presiding over a shrinking cultural realm, performing grandeur amid wobbling sets — may linger.
For now, the man at the center of it has shown little inclination to retreat. As the hosts themselves noted, Mr. Trump continues to post, to call in, to appear and to demand stage time. The spectacle, in other words, is likely to continue — and the late-night writers’ room appears ready to keep treating it as the most inexhaustible material they have.
