It was an eventful evening for CBS’s host of The Late Show, Stephen Colbert. First, during his monologue, Colbert praised Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde’s plea to Trump that repeated several left-wing grievances and claimed Vice President JD Vance was upset during the sermon because he could not have sex with the pew. Second, Colbert later welcomed CBS News’s John Dickerson to give a historically-challenged warning that Donald Trump’s autocratic aspirations are unlike those of previous presidents.
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Later, Colbert told Dickerson, “Well, certainly we’re at a time now when autocracy is rising around the globe, and so with the 1930s. I mean, it’s just sort of de rigueur to have a dictator right now.”
Historically, when one thinks of concentrated presidential power, Franklin Roosevelt comes to mind, but Dickerson tried to portray his desire to expand the power of the office as just wanting to hire a few more bureaucratic paper pushers, “Well, literally back with FDR, I can't remember whether—some columnist said if we need FDR to be our Mussolini, then that might be necessary. But when you look at what FDR was asking for as he sought to originally expand the presidency, it was teeny tiny. He went to Congress and said, you know, I need more staff because the modern age runs very quickly and I need more people in the executive branch. 330,000 Western Union telegrams were sent to Washington in opposition.”
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