MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace laughed on Wednesday after noting that President Donald Trump appears to be stealing Stephen Colbert’s old act... except what once was parody, is now reality.
Trump this week bragged to the Washington Post about his “gut” being smarter than anyone’s brain.
“I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me,” the president said.
Wallace played a clip of Colbert ― in his “Colbert Report” character, which was a mocking version of a right-wing TV host ― making very similar comments at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2006.
“Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head?” Colbert asked, adding:
“You can look it up. Now I know some of you are going to say you did look it up and that’s not true. That’s ’cuz you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works.”
That caused Wallace to start laughing.
“In 2006, it was just a punchline,” she said. “In 2018, it’s policy.”
She also quoted Trump’s unusual explanation for his dismissal of climate change.
“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers,” Trump told the Post.
That caused a whole new round of laughing.
Later in the segment, she played a supercut of Trump boasting of his intelligence ― including his “stable genius” comments ― which triggered even more snickers from Wallace and her guests.
Colbert, incidentally, also noted that Trump’s comments sounded a lot like his own old jokes.
“Trump stole my bit,” he said Wednesday night, playing a different clip of his “gut” comments.
Calling it “copyright infringement” of his “anti-intellectual property,” Colbert then used one of Trump’s own tactics against him: a legal threat.
“Tonight, I am officially announcing that I am suing Donald J. Trump for stealing my old character,” he said. “You better lawyer up, buddy, and somebody better than Rudy Giuliani, too.”