Tim Balk
New York: Late-night talk shows are facing pressure from US President Donald Trump and the Federal Communications Commission, who accuse them of tilting left in their jokes and guests.
But that did not stop Stephen Colbert from airing an interview with former president Barack Obama on Tuesday night (US time) as Colbert’s cancelled CBS show heads towards its final episode this month.
Obama used the interview to go after Trump, but never mentioned him by name. He urged Democrats to avoid sounding like academics when talking to voters. And he talked about aliens.
Here are five notable moments from Colbert’s interview with Obama, which was filmed in early April at Obama’s soon-to-open presidential centre on the South Side of Chicago and aired on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
(A White House spokesperson, Davis Ingle, responded to the interview by issuing a statement insulting Obama and Colbert, saying, “Only pathetic train wrecks like Stephen Colbert would waste their time interviewing one of the worst presidents in history.”)
Running for president? ‘The bar has changed’
While Trump did not come up by name in the interview, Obama made a series of not-so-subtle critiques of the current president and his administration. After Colbert jokingly raised the possibility of running for president, Obama suggested it was not so ridiculous for the comic to run for the White House.
“The bar has changed,” Obama said, holding back laughter. “Let me put it this way: I think that you could perform significantly better than some folks that we’ve seen. I have great confidence in that.”
Colbert asked, “Is that an endorsement?”
“It was not,” Obama said.
Advice for Democrats: speak in ‘plain English’
At a moment when many Democrats are concerned that their party lacks leadership and is too divided to stand up effectively to the Trump administration, Obama expressed confidence that most Democrats remained united on core principles.
“I’m not as worried about this so-called rift,” Obama told Colbert.
“There are a bunch of things that we agree on,” Obama said.
“It’s really more of a question of, ‘All right, what are the specific things that we have to do?’ ”
The former president said he was more focused on how his party was communicating with voters.
“What I’m more interested in for Democrats is: ‘Do you know how to just talk to regular people like we’re not in a college seminar?’ ” Obama said. “Can you talk plain English to folks?”
Mamdani and the practice of no ‘gobbledygook’
Obama pointed to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist whose politics are far to the left of the former president but whom Obama has embraced, describing him as an effective communicator. He said successful Democrats would, like Mamdani, not speak in “gobbledygook”.
Obama called Mamdani “an extraordinary talent”.
Justice Department concerns
Obama also appeared to lay out some specific concerns about Trump’s second term.
Asked by Colbert what powers he did not believe a US president should have, Obama said the US Justice Department should remain independent of the White House and not be used as a tool to go after foes.
The country’s democracy can “survive a lot”, the former president said, but “we can’t overcome the politicisation of the criminal justice system”.
‘The idea is that the attorney-general is the people’s lawyer. It’s not the president’s consigliere.’
Barack Obama
Without directly raising Trump, who has used the Justice Department to target his perceived enemies during his second term, Obama said that the attorney-general must be able to operate independently of the whims of a president.
“The idea is that the attorney-general is the people’s lawyer,” Obama said. “It’s not the president’s consigliere.”
The former president also said it was important that presidents “don’t politicise our military”. And he added that presidents should not have a “bunch of side hustles”. Trump has merged partisan politics with his role as commander in chief, and his family and allies have retained or built stakes in industries that the government oversees.
An addendum … on aliens
Pressed by Colbert on whether the government was concealing secrets about extraterrestrial life, a chuckling Obama insisted that it was not.
Obama, who recently generated headlines by telling podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen that he believed aliens were “real”, told Colbert that his position was not based on any secret government intelligence. If there were any such government secrets, the former president said, “It would leak.”
“One of the things you learn as president is government is terrible at keeping secrets,” Obama said.
He added: “If there were aliens, or alien spaceships, or anything under the control of the United States government that we knew about, [had] seen, photographs, what have you, I promise you, some guy guarding the installation would have taken a selfie with one of the aliens and sent it to his girlfriend.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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