“He’s gone from being a birther to a deather,” quipped the late night comedian. “And if there was any justice, he’d be a lifer.”
Colbert was responding to a reported prediction from a senior White House official that Trump would soon begin questioning the official death toll from the coronavirus in a desperate bid to stave off criticism of his botched handling of the pandemic.
Denying the deaths of Americans would be “next-level cruel,” the “Late Show” host said.
“It’s also not going to work,” he added. “They’ll be gone. People will notice.”
Trump was a leading proponent of the racist “birther” conspiracy theory that questioned Barack Obama’s legitimacy as the country’s first Black president. The theory claimed that Obama was not born in the United States — even though he was.
While the term “deather” appears to have no official meaning, it has previously been used to describe people who do not believe that al Qaeda leader and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden was killed in a U.S. raid in 2011.
Check out Colbert’s full monologue here:
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