On Monday’s “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert had an amusing response to news recently about some Orwellian changes made to an exhibit at the the Smithsonian Institution — and it involved zinging one of this late night TV colleagues.
“You know something? No, you don’t, because things cannot be known anymore. What you thought you knew is just history, especially history, because the Smithsonian has now removed Trump from the impeachment exhibit in the American History Museum,” Colbert said at the top of his monologue.
“Oh, now you care what’s in the American History Museum. Where was that enthusiasm when dad worked so hard to plan the family trip to DC?” Colbert joked after the audience booed that news.
“Here’s here’s what happened: the Smithsonian has a long standing exhibit on presidential impeachment. It’s got the Watergate file cabinet, whatever Andrew Johnson did bad, a bunch of Bill Clinton sex stuff, non-Epstein edition. In 2021, after the whole Trump-sent-a-mob-to-storm-the-Capitol thing, they added a label that included content about Trump’s two impeachments, but then, according to an insider last month, they removed the label as part of a ‘content review, following pressure from the White House.”
“That kind of pressure explains why the Smithsonian exhibit on the 1960s now says that the Vietnam War was started by Jimmy Kimmel,” Colbert joked.
Now for its part, the Smithsonian says the removal of that information had nothing to do with pressure from the White House, and it over the weekend that the material about Trump will be restored.
Colbert continued, “now that the Trump impeachments have been yanked, the exhibit says only three presidents have seriously faced removal. Come on, if you’re if you’re going to completely make up presidential history, make it fun, like this.”
At this point, Colbert turned to a different camera where he was in the center of a cartoony carboard drawing and under a sign that said “Presidential Fun Facts,” and said, “Zachary Taylor’s favorite meat was squirrel. It used to be a delicacy, but we don’t eat it now because of woke.”
Watch the whole monologue below:
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