“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.
Colbert said denying the deaths of Americans would be “next-level cruel.”
“It’s also not going to work,” he said. “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. It claimed he was not born in the U.S. ? 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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