Stephen Colbert to President Trump: I Won

There is a genre of Trump coverage that begins with the president of the United States deciding that an important thing for the commander in chief to talk about in an interview is the performance of television hosts, be it news, reality show or late night comedy, and their ratings. This is often accompanied by a counterfactual account of the president’s own place in all that. From there, what follows is a jumble of inter-related content that includes fact-checks, entertainer clap backs, and write-ups of the cathartic response, which in the end isn’t all that cathartic, since the subtext running through this is a bewildered acknowledgement that these are the times we live in.