Stephen Colbert Returns with Monologue Mocking Trump’s Secret Intelligence on Iran Bombing: ‘2003 Is Back, Baby!”

CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert returned from his holiday break and jumped right into mocking the secret intelligence cited by President Donald Trump for his provocative airstrikes in Iraq, one of which killed Iran’s Quds Force commander, Qassem Soleimani: “2003 is back, baby!”

In a segment Colbert called “America at Whaaa? Crisis with Iran…in Iraq…about Iran,” the comedian noted that Trump threatened to bomb 52 more Iranian sites — one for each of the American hostages taken during the 1979–80 takeover of the US embassy in Teheran — if that country dared to retaliate for the US airstrike killing Soleimani.

“He’s still mad about the Iranian hostage crisis? What’s next on his 1980 agenda?” Colbert wondered before breaking into a Trump impersonation: “I’m also targeting four top Iranian generals— one for each of the Three Men and a baby, six different regions: One for each side of the Rubik’s Cube, and I have changed the launch codes to: 876-5309.”

Colbert went on to note other historical parallels between this White House’s secretive claims of an “imminent threat” from a Middle Eastern country to similar rhetoric in the past.

“According to officials who were briefed on the strike, the evidence about an imminent threat was ‘razor thin,’” Colbert noted. “So, a new, dangerous conflict in the Middle East, launched by the US government on a murky premise, with razor thin evidence. You know what that means: 2003 is back, baby! In 17 years, we’ve come full circle, from yellow cake to chocolate cake, from WMD to KFC.”

Watch the video above, via CBS.

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