Late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert blasted Fox News and referred to former President Donald Trump as “Putin’s puppet” on Monday night when discussing the recent arrest of some of his show’s team members at the U.S. Capitol.
Colbert explained that his own rubber rottweiler puppet — Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog — had extended invitations to interview members of Congress about the hearings of the January 6 committee. Several Congress members accepted, and so Colbert’s team visited the Capitol to conduct the interviews.
However, last Thursday, U.S. Capitol police arrested Colbert’s team members, thinking that they had intruded.
“[My team was] doing some last-minute puppetry and jokey make-them-ups in a hallway when Triumph and my folks were approached and detained by the Capitol Police, which actually isn’t that surprising,” Colbert said during his Monday night monologue.
“The Capitol Police are much more cautious than they were say 18 months ago and for a very good reason. If you don’t know what that reason is, I know what news network you watch,” he added, knocking Fox News.
He then mentioned that Fox News’ resident white supremacist Tucker Carlson and other conservative pundits had disingenuously accused his team of staging an “insurrection” on the Capitol.
“I am shocked I have to explain the difference but an insurrection involves disrupting the lawful actions of Congress and howling for the blood of elected leaders or to prevent the peaceful transfer of power,” Colbert said. “Now, it’s predictable why these TV talkers are talking like this on the TV. They want to talk about something other than the January 6 hearings on the actual seditious insurrection that led to the deaths of multiple people, the injury of over 140 police officers.”
“But drawing any equivalence between rioters storming our capitol to prevent the counting of electoral ballots, and a cigar-chomping toy dog is a shameful and grotesque insult to the memory of everyone who died and obscenely trivializes the service and the courage the Capitol Police showed on that terrible day,” Colbert added.
Then, he began joking, “Maybe there was a vast conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States with a rubber Rottweiler…. We all know the long history of puppet lawlessness: the Great Muppet Caper, the Fraggle riots of the 1980s.”
“In this case, our puppet was just a puppet doing puppet stuff,” he continued. “Hard to say, so much has changed in Washington that the Capitol police do have to stay on high alert at all times. Because of the attack on January 6, as the hearings prove more clearly every day, the blame for that actual insurrection, all lies with Putin’s puppet.”
The phrase “Putin’s puppet” refers, of course, to Trump. It has long been thought that Trump has been supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a way to cause division among Americans and to undermine faith in U.S. Democracy. To this end, Putin’s puppet has been very effective indeed.