Stephen Colbert opened The Late Show on Thursday, a year after the day since COVID-19 was officially considered a pandemic, by playing a slightly modified version of the new PSA with four former presidents.
In addition to the clips of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter promoting each of the vaccines, this one included Donald Trump predicting that the virus would magically “disappear” without the need for a vaccine.
Actually, the 45th president was nowhere to be seen in the announcement, which premiered online Thursday morning. After dusting off his impression of W. to make fun of Bush for choosing a baseball game like the one he most hopes to do now that he’s been vaccinated, Colbert turned to the living ex-president who is obviously disappearing.
“Maybe your invitation was lost by mail … because it destroyed the postal service!” the host joked. “The 45 was left out of the POTUS PSA party, but issued its own statement about the vaccine.”
From there, he read aloud the “statement” that Trump would have preferred to tweet: “I hope everyone remembers when he got the vaccine against COVID-19 (often called the China virus), that if I weren’t President, at most, you wouldn’t get this beautiful “shot” for 5 years, and you probably wouldn’t get it at all. I hope everyone remembers it! “
“First of all, this is incredibly sad,” Colbert replied. “Secondly, pathetic. Third, how did we find out about this statement? You can’t tweet these things. Have you finished printing and stapling it to Palm Beach phone sticks? You may have just released ‘Ex-prez will have credit and will teach you the guitar!
“We banned him from Twitter,” he concluded. “Can we ban his role? Is that possible? “