September 9, 2015

Stephen Colbert Perfectly Roasts Trump and the Media’s Obsession With Him in Dazzling Debut


Last night Stephen Colbert premiered The Late Show on CBS, the talk-show staple he took over from David Letterman (who performed his final show in May). Colbert’s guests included Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush, George Clooney, and a cursed ancient amulet with a taste for hummus (an ingenious play on Colbert’s requirement to ruthlessly sell products to his new, larger late-night audience.)

Colbert’s tone was predictably a departure from that of the buffoonish conservative zealot he played on The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. Here, while still a smart goofball, Colbert seemed delighted to shed a decade of playing just one character, and noticeably conscious of taking on a bigger stage, quite literally: The Ed Sullivan theater in Manhattan has been sumptuously renovated and decorated for the occasion.

One of the best segments, in an unpredictable and larger-than-life show jammed with jokes, was when Colbert ripped into everyone’s favorite top-polling, golden-haired, low-hanging comedic fruit—Donald Trump—and satirized the media’s gluttonous obsession with covering him (using another not-so-subtle product placement). Enjoy:

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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