In the wake of Lara Trump’s stunning television debut as Donald Trump’s newest Grigory Potemkin, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert had to step its game up, because her decision to deliver a torrent of misleading pro-Trump stories direct to the American public—but especially direct to Donald Trump—clearly impinged on Colbert’s territory. He’s been delivering misleading pro-Trump news direct to the president since the election, as part of a segment called Real News Tonight. (It does not escape Colbert that Lara Trump signs off by calling her show “the real news.”) You may recall Real News Tonight’s extraordinary work during the Comey hearings, when reporters Jim Anchorton and Jill Newslady helped Trump’s team distract the president from watching former FBI director James Comey’s testimony by breaking a story he’d find more interesting:
This just in: The White House freezer is broken, and the chefs need a big brave hero to come eat all the ice cream before it melts!
But now that Trump has his own people to break stories like “this is a president who is putting America before himself,” Colbert must have worried that Jim Anchorton and Jill Newslady’s jobs were at risk, because he wasted no time bringing Lara Trump into the Real News Tonight fold. She rose to the challenge: In her first report as a special correspondent, she skillfully answered tough questions like, “How are the jobs jobbing?” and “What’s the latest on the president’s generosity?” Trump was so unflappable and impressive, Jill Newslady went so far as to call her “a brilliant vessel for children with sacred Trump blood in their veins.”
But Lara Trump will have to do even better next time if she wants to keep her job, because she wasn’t Real News Tonight’s only new hire. They also brought in White House Special Advisor “Perky Kushner-Trump,” who has clearly been keeping his floppy ears to the ground. It’s not so much that he has better sources than Lara—they’re both hearing the same growing consensus that Donald Trump is a wonderful president—but Kushner-Trump has a raw animal talent for distilling the president’s message into terms even his most fervent supporters—including Trump himself, naturally—can understand. Will this brave good boy find a way to teach President Trump to stop shitting the bed? For more on that issue, let’s check in with our special correspondent Gary Larson.
