As he said himself last night on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert doesn’t cover many stories from outside the country, so he tried to rectify that last night.
Considering the amount of news we have to sift through every day, it seems unsurprising that Stephen Colbert and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert writers would probably focus on the stories that have the most potential for hilarious one-liners. Can we really blame them? Well, no.
It just so happens that the stories that had that potential involved other countries last night. Here’s Colbert’s opening monologue from last night’s episode. (Warning: one bleeped out word, which you can probably guess from the title of the video; additionally, there are a bunch of jokes about softwood, and you can also figure out where this is going.)
Here’s the thing, though. Colbert isn’t kidding about the fact that this is an actual thing that is happening. There is, according to CNBC, “a long-running trade dispute” about Canadian softwood because of where it comes from: public land as opposed to private land here in the States. Naturally, Canada, as Colbert notes, “strongly disagrees” with the move, which CNBC reports will affect around 5 billion dollars’ worth of imports yearly.
But Colbert only found so much material in that story, so he also moved to the other international news lately: Ivanka Trump’s visit to Germany. Here’s the NPR article Colbert is citing, by the way. She sat on this panel with Queen Maxima of the Netherlands and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, although Colbert didn’t dive into that quite as much.
And as for the other, other Ivanka news? Yup, he covered that incident as well, about her clothing line. Fortune’s report carefully notes that the label didn’t know this was happening.
Next: Colbert vs. Meyers on the First 100 Days
What do you think of Colbert’s coverage? Sound off in the comments below.