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Arts & EntertainmentDonald Trump

Late-Night Comedians Had a Field Day With the Trump Stories in Michael Wolff’s ‘Fire and Fury’

By
Tom Huddleston Jr.
Tom Huddleston Jr.
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January 5, 2018, 1:35 PM ET

Michael Wolff’s inflammatory inside-the-White-House book Fire and Fury has been the talk of Washington, D.C. for days. But last night, some of the book’s more incendiary passages also took center stage on late-night television, with comedians like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel skewering President Donald Trump over some of the book’s alleged revelations from his first year in office.

“This book is loaded with the dish,” Colbert said in his CBS Late Show monologue, which included several notable instances of former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon slamming Trump and his inner circle. Colbert specifically mentioned that Bannon described as “treasonous” the meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, other Trump campaign officials, and a Russian lawyer. “Oh, my. What is that?” Colbert joked. “I agree with Steve Bannon? That old gypsy was right.”

On ABC, Jimmy Kimmel mocked the cease-and-desist letter that Trump’s lawyer sent to Fire and Fury publisher Henry Holt & Co. “If you don’t want people to read a book about you, why would you take legal action to stop people from reading a book about you?” Kimmel asked of Trump. “I wasn’t gonna buy the book. I was just going to read the excerpts in magazines and move on. But, now that Trump’s lawyers are going all out to try and stop it from being published, I’m buying 20 copies.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e0bUPfHU4s

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And on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, host Trevor Noah made light of the fact that many critics are skeptical that all of the anecdotes in Fire and Fury are accurate. Noah joked: “That’s what makes it a perfect scandal for this White House: bizarre, unverified, fraudulent claims.”

Wolff’s book officially went on sale on Friday, four days earlier than the publisher had previously planned, due to high demand and, presumably, in response to that cease-and-desist letter.

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By Tom Huddleston Jr.
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