Yesterday Mitt Romney tore into Donald Trump in a speech at the Hinckley Institute, calling him a “phony” and a failed businessman and arguing that Republican voters in the remaining primaries need to vote for whichever candidate is most likely to beat Trump in that state in hopes of forcing a brokered convention. Trump responded in typical Trump style, calling Romney an “embarrassment” who’s using Trump’s popularity to get his name in the press again. So we have the last GOP presidential candidate at open war with the man poised to claim that title this year, blowing open the on-going struggle between the GOP establishment and the angry electorate whose rage they’ve been egging on for years.
If you’re a Republican, this odious sideshow is tearing your party apart. If you’re not, well, the whole thing is pretty damn hilarious. And sad. And frightening. But mostly hilarious.
Stephen Colbert has been mining Republican insincerity for laughs for almost two decades now, and although his CBS show isn’t as single-mindedly focused on politics as The Colbert Report was, he still talks about it basically every single night. If you skip past the awkward monologues and bail before the uncomfortable celebrity interviews, you can find a solid ten minutes or so of comedy that’s as strong as a typical Report episode. Case in point: his segment last night on the Romney/Trump war, which you can watch above (and which you should watch). We have to wait a week apiece for John Oliver and Samantha Bee, and if you’re looking for a more frequent source of hilarious political commentary, Colbert is still the place to go.