Stephen Colbert Opens ‘The Late Show’ With Message of “Grief for My Beautiful Country”

Stephen Colbert on ‘The Late Show.’

Scott Kowalchyk/CBS

Stephen Colbert‘s The Late Show is airing live this week in conjunction with the Republican National Convention, but the CBS host opened Monday’s episode with a prerecorded message condemning last weekend’s assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

“The United States came close to a great tragedy on Saturday when at a political rally down in Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old gunman shot and nearly killed a former president and the man who today became the 2024 Republican nominee,” Colbert said. “My immediate reaction when I saw this on Saturday was horror at what was unfolding, relief that Donald Trump had lived and, frankly, grief for my beautiful country — and then fresh horror, as we learned that attendees had also been shot, one of whom died at the rally.”

Colbert offered this context as reason for starting his show, scheduled to be live this week, in a prerecorded segment from his desk, but also said, “I could just as easily start the show moaning on the floor, because how many times do we need to learn the lesson that violence has no role in our politics, that the entire objective of a democracy is to fight out our differences with — as the saying goes — a ballot, not a bullet.”

The comedian then said a friend had texted him immediately after the shooting to say, “How is this happening in America in 2024?”

“I understood his shock,” Colbert said, “but I’m old enough that one of my earliest memories is sitting in a dark room with my sister watching my parents’ little black-and-white TV, and seeing Bobby Kennedy’s coffin on that slow train from New York down to Washington. And whether the result of extremist politics or mental illness, that violence is with us still — from the shooting of a GOP baseball practice that seriously injured Steve Scalise, to the plot to kidnap and kill Governor Gretchen Whitmer, to the hammer attack that nearly killed Paul Pelosi, to the horrors of Jan. 6, to this most recent attack.”

The host went on to say that Saturday’s attacker, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was “someone barely out of boyhood who reportedly donated to a Democratic group in 2021, then registered as a Republican that same year,” noting that “we may never understand his motivation, nor is that necessarily our job.”

Colbert finished his message, like many others this weekend, with a call to “reject violence and violent rhetoric in this time of crisis.”

“Not only is violence evil, it is useless,” Colbert said. “As I quoted [science fiction writer Isaac Asimov] when Representative Steve Scalise was shot, ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’ Violence, or even calls for violence, invalidate any ideas.”

Colbert’s show will cover this week’s RNC in Milwaukee closely, and do the same for the Democratic Party’s convention in Chicago next month. “These conventions will be about the candidates who are nominated, but they’re really about the ideas that these two candidates represent and the future America they want to lead us to,” he said. “In the wake of this attack on Saturday, many Americans on both sides of the aisle, from President Biden to Speaker Johnson, are calling on all this to change how we see each other, how we treat each other, how we talk to each other. That may or may not happen, but those conflicting ideas will remain the same. So this week, we’re going to do our best to talk about those ideas, the people who represent those ideas, and many other things, with guests and who knows, if we’re lucky, maybe some fart jokes.”