The emotions of CBS’s Stephen Colbert continued to fluctuate wildly as he went from panicked on Monday to hopeful on Tuesday to solemnly imploring people to vote against Donald Trump and his “Christo-fascist future” on Wednesday’s edition of The Late Show. Also on Wednesday, Colbert welcomed Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to the show to accuse Trump of wanting to have her assassinated.
Like so many on the left, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has become shorthand for the supposed nightmare that will fall on America should Trump win:
Project 2025 is an obvious and chilling blueprint for a Christo-fascist future, and Trump knows that that is toxic to voters. So he has denied any knowledge of or connection to it. But no matter how hard Trump tries to distance himself, he can't change the fact that it's run by more than 200 former officials of the Trump administration and that the GOP platform has been crafted and influenced by individuals with deep ties to Project 2025 and I just hope that once voters learn everything that Trump and his cronies stand for, they will turn out in massive numbers to vote for Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or whoever the Democrats nominate and we'll finally be able to kick Donald Trump out of our lives forever.
In the real world, Project 2025 is just Heritage’s fancy name for its quadrennial Mandate for Leadership that it releases every four years as its wish list should the Republican win the presidential election.
Later in the show, Colbert promoted Whitmer’s new book, “Again, once again, the book here is True Gretch and about your life, your time in office, and one chapter explores, and this is a weird sentence to read. Explores the 2020 plot to kidnap and assassinate you over COVID restrictions. Which is something that I think we too easily forget how insane it got at the height of COVID and especially with the COVID denialism. What do you most remember about when you found out that this was happening? And how did this experience change you?”
The missing context of this is that the people who were a part of this scheme were also not necessarily fans of Trump. Additionally, some were acquitted because a jury determined that undercover FBI agents were responsible for propelling the plot forward, but naturally Whitmer wasn’t interested in that context:
I also observed that the federal government had no federal strategy and that really made Donald Trump angry and that's when he started singling me out. When he called me "That woman from Michigan," that's when my Republican legislature turned on me and started suing me to take away my powers and wouldn’t extend my stay at home orders and every time Trump even mentioned Michigan, I got more death threats. There was a cause and effect and he knew it. He knew that his words incited people to action.
She added that “we had threats against officeholders who were just trying to keep people safe. You know, this plot that came to be was 14 people who wanted to—who took up guns and wanted to kill a governor for telling them to wear a mask. That's not a rational reaction.”
It’s not, but neither is closing off only certain sections of department stores or imposing never-ending restrictions. Her rules were so ridiculous, she herself violated them and has admitted they were nonsensical. The Michigan Supreme Court ruled her orders violated the law because, while Democrats claim the president isn’t a king, they apparently believe that the governor is a queen. Simply pointing this out at the time was in no way suggesting that Whitmer should’ve been assassinated, but it is a way to try to shame her critics into shutting up.
Here is a transcript for the July 10 show:
CBS The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
7/10/2024
11:58 PM ET
STEPHEN COLBERT: Project 2025 is an obvious and chilling blueprint for a Christo-fascist future, and Trump knows that that is toxic to voters. So he has denied any knowledge of or connection to it. But no matter how hard Trump tries to distance himself, he can't change the fact that it's run by more than 200 former officials of the Trump administration and that the GOP platform has been crafted and influenced by individuals with deep ties to Project 2025 and I just hope that once voters learn everything that Trump and his cronies stand for, they will turn out in massive numbers to vote for Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or whoever the Democrats nominate and we'll finally be able to kick Donald Trump out of our lives forever.
…
COLBERT: Hey, everybody! We're back with the author of the new book True Gretch and governor of the great state of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. Again, once again, the book here is True Gretch and about your life, your time in office, and one chapter explores, and this is a weird sentence to read. Explores the 2020 plot to kidnap and assassinate you over COVID restrictions.
GRETCHEN WHITMER: Yeah.
COLBERT: Which is something that I think we too easily forget how insane it got at the height of COVID and especially with the COVID denialism. What do you most remember about when you found out that this was happening? And how did this experience change you?
WHITMER: Well, I've got to tell you, like every governor of the country, I was trying to fuel the plane while we were flying it. We were addressing a pandemic that was killing our people. We were getting misinformation out of the White House. We were told to go find your own masks and gloves and Detroit at the same time as New York City and New Orleans and Chicago was on fire early on.
Our hospitals were full. We had makeshift morgues and I was told to go find your own equipment. So, I went on national television asking for help. I also observed that the federal government had no federal strategy and that really made Donald Trump angry and that's when he started singling me out. When he called me "That woman from Michigan," that's when my Republican legislature turned on me and started suing me to take away my powers and wouldn’t extend my stay at home orders and every time Trump even mentioned Michigan, I got more death threats. There was a cause and effect and he knew it. He knew that his words incited people to action.
When he mentioned the Proud Boys is in his debate, he knew what that language meant and so when we all watched January 6 happen, no one in Michigan was surprised because we saw it happening a lot earlier in our state and that's why I think it's really important that people remember we have hundreds of thousands of Americans die because the federal government couldn't figure out how to handle a pandemic and dot the federal government, but Donald Trump.
We had threats against officeholders who were just trying to keep people safe. You know, this plot that came to be was 14 people who wanted to — who took up guns and wanted to kill a governor for telling them to wear a mask. That's not a rational reaction.
