In a fiery segment on Thursday night, Stephen Colbert put former president Donald Trump on blast for his role in “amplifying” the anti-Asian hate that led to the recent shooting in Atlanta. While highlighting Trump’s continued rhetoric that blames China for the coronavirus pandemic, which Trump has frequently called the “Chinese virus” or “kung flu,” Colbert efficiently argued that the former president uses hate as a tool to “blame his own failings on a foreign country,” which will continue to cause racial violence like we saw in Atlanta.
“Our former president bears a particular responsibility for amplifying this form of hatred, just as surely as he bears responsibility for the series of events he incited on January 6th,” Colbert argued before tearing into fallout of Trump’s presidency. Via The Guardian:
“This will always be part of his legacy,” Colbert concluded. “He will be remembered as a hateful man who left a stain not just on the White House pillows but on our whole society by inviting his Maga minions to an all-you-can-hate racist buffet.”
The Late Show‘s host argument echoes a similar warning from actress Olivia Munn, who has been speaking out since the Atlanta shooting in an effort to raise awareness that Asian-Americans have had a “target on our backs” since the start of the pandemic. “It feels like it’s open season on us. And we need help and we need people to care about what is happening to us,” Munn told TODAY. “You look at what happened in Atlanta. This doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”