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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Entertainment
Guardian staff

Stephen Colbert: ‘I am actually surprised that Truth Social had value’

Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert on Truth Social: ‘No one has seen a loss this big since the Trump Taj Mahal, the Trump Hotel, Trump steaks, Trump airlines, Trump university and Trump, Eric.’ Photograph: YouTube

Late-night hosts talked another gag order in Trump’s hush money case, Trump’s new loan and Donald Trump Jr’s “boyhood home” of Trump Tower.

Stephen Colbert

On Tuesday, Donald Trump posted a $175m bond so he could appeal his $454m fraud judgment after a weeks-long search for someone to put up the cash. That company? Knight Specialty Insurance, which is run by CEO Don Hankey, the so-called “king of subprime car loans”.

“Yes, he’s the king now, but one day, the throne will return to its rightful heir: Lord Floppy Noodle,” joked Stephen Colbert on the Late Show.

Hankey explained his reason for giving Trump the money as: “I heard that he needed a loan … and this is what we do.”

“Yes, this is what they do,” Colbert remarked. “You know their slogan: ‘Turned down by the banky? Don’t get so cranky! Call me, Don Hankey. You’ll say, why, thanky! Don, good luck with the case about the porn star spanky.’”

Still, “between the $175m Trump put up in this case and the $91m in the E Jean Carroll case, Trump somehow posted way less money this week than he lost on Wall Street,” Colbert noted, as Truth Social reportedly lost $4bn in value after SEC documents revealed the social media company was hemorrhaging money.

“Wow, I am actually surprised that Truth Social had value,” Colbert said. The stock opened on Tuesday at $48.66 a share, down 39% from its high of $79.38 a week ago. “Truly, an historic failure,” said Colbert. “No one has seen a loss this big since the Trump Taj Mahal, the Trump Hotel, Trump steaks, Trump airlines, Trump University and Trump, Eric.”

Colbert also took time to roast Anything is Possible, the new country song from Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who is married to his son Eric. “It’s true, anything is possible – for instance, it’s possible to have a voice even Autotune can’t fix,” he joked.

Lara Trump had the great strategy of releasing her track on the same day as Beyoncé’s critical smash Cowboy Carter. “So sad that Beyoncé released country music on the same day that country music was strangled to death,” Colbert deadpanned.

Jimmy Kimmel

“Our former president got a loan from a repo man,” Jimmy Kimmel laughed, noting that Hankey’s company reportedly repossesses about 250 cars a day. “Not just any run-of-the-mill repo man,” he added, as Hankey’s company is famous for changing their caller ID to pose as a local pizza place as they repossess cars. “I would love to be there to see Trump waiting at the door for a meat lovers supreme, only to find out his tower has been repossessed nextdoor,” said Kimmel.

On Truth Social, Trump blamed the need to post bond on “crooked” Joe Biden, “which is particularly upsetting, because ‘crooked’ was his nickname for Hillary”, said Kimmel. “You can’t just reassign a nickname! You can’t have Magic Johnson and Magic Larry Bird, it doesn’t work like that.

“This is just lazy Donald Trump-ing, is what it is,” he added. “I know he’s not ashamed of anything, but he should at least be ashamed of this.”

In other Trump news, the judge in Trump’s hush-money case issued a gag order in the after Trump publicly attacked the judge’s daughter on Truth Social, “which is just nuts”, said Kimmel. Nevertheless, Trump posted about his daughter again on Truth Social on Tuesday morning. “And guess what happened to him? Nothing. Nothing happened,” Kimmel lamented. “Are laws real? Because I’ve been stupidly following them my whole life now, and they don’t seem to matter.

“Donald Trump thinks a gag order is what Melania does when she sees him get out of the hot tub,” he added.

Seth Meyers

And on Late Night, Seth Meyers also opened with news of Trump’s latest gag order, in which the New York judge warned that Trump could lose access to his jurors’ names if he does anything to harm the integrity of the jury selection process.

“Why does he have access to the jurors’ names?!” Meyers wondered. “That’s like giving Cruella DeVille the address of the local animal shelter.”

In a new fundraising email, Donald Trump Jr warned that the New York attorney general, Letitia James, is trying to seize Trump Tower, and said that she is “seizing my boyhood home”.

“Boyhood home? It’s not a shack on the banks of the Mississippi!” Meyers exclaimed. “It’s weird to call something your boyhood home when it has a restaurant in the lobby.”

And according to a new report from the real estate website Zillow, the worst time to purchase a home is in the fall or winter. “And the best time is in 1958,” Meyers quipped.

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