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Stephen Colbert has reacted to Donald Trump’s return to the White House, mocking the president for his last-minute decision to relocate the inauguration indoors due to winter temperatures.
Days before the Monday (January 20) ceremony, the transition team announced that for the first time in decades, the elaborate event, which commonly takes place outside on the steps of the Capitol, would be held inside the Capitol Rotunda.
Hours after the ceremony, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert host teased Trump for the last-minute location change in his opening monologue.
“It was a frigid day down in Washington, so, at the last minute, Trump moved his inauguration indoors. Totally understandable, so Mr. President, it is with the utmost respect that I say… ‘Oh, was the big, strong, greatest president ever feeling a little chilly? You want some hot cocoa with marshmallows?’”
Switching from a mocking baby voice back to his regular voice, he concluded: “You weather cuck.”
Colbert further made fun of the president for citing President Ronald Reagan’s indoor 1985 inauguration as inspiration for the venue change.
Reading aloud the president’s Truth Social post in his best Trump voice, the late-night host recited: “I have ordered the Inauguration Address, in addition to prayers and other speeches, to be delivered in the United States Capitol Rotunda, as was used by Ronald Reagan in 1985, also because of very cold weather.”
“Don’t act like you’re doing it just because of Reagan,” Colbert huffed, quipping: “Honey, it’s not that I couldn’t perform in bed last night. It’s just that out of respect for President Carter I’m flying at half-staff.”
As part of his first five executive orders, Trump declared that all flags be flown at full mast for the remainder of Monday and any future inauguration days.
The order came after he had complained that the American flags around the Capitol would only be flown at half mast during his inaugural celebrations in honor of President Carter, who died on December 29 at the age of 100.
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Per tradition, flags are flown at half-staff 30 days following the death of a president.
“… Because of the death of President Jimmy Carter, the Flag may, for the first time ever during an Inauguration of a future President, be at half mast. Nobody wants to see this, and no American can be happy about it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at the beginning of the month.
Elsewhere in his monologue, Colbert called out Americans for turning a blind eye to Trump’s previous actions and electing him to office yet again.
“How do you make sense of today? How did we get here?” the comedian asked. “Well, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld had these famous axioms. He had three of them: There was ‘known knowns,’ things that you know that you know. There are ‘known unknowns,’ things that you know that you don’t know. And then there are ‘unknown unknowns,’ things that you don’t know, that you don’t know.
“He said that that last group was the most dangerous. But he never completed the quartet of the possible combinations,” Colbert continued. “The most dangerous one is the ‘unknown knowns’ — things that we know, but we choose to unknow for some reason. There may be a perfectly understandable reason the American people have decided to unknow what they definitely knew about Donald Trump.”
Well, “today, the great remembering began,” he added.
