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Stephen Colbert kicked off Sunday night’s 69th Emmy Awards in characteristic style — with snark, a clip from cable news, and jazz hands. The question with Colbert’s monologue was not if he would get political, but instead just how political it would be: As “The Late Show’s” host, in this particularly turbulent political climate, he’s found a sweet spot that engages regularly with politics but steers clear of the “Colbert Report” persona that made him famous. The opening of Sunday night’s Emmys was the perfect expression of his current style. It was also genuinely hilarious, with a gloves-off sass that took on both the White House and Hollywood in general.
The defining moment, in the final minute, was when disgraced former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer wheeled out a podium onstage in order to assure Colbert, jokingly, that the ratings for the night’s broadcast would be great. The camera quickly cut to an amused Melissa McCarthy — who famously impersonated Spicer on “Saturday Night Live” in an impression so ruthless that it caught the attention of the Oval Office — as well as picking up on shocked and/or horrified expressions from audience members Anna Chlumsky, Julie Bowen, and Sarah Hyland. Rumors had swirled about a big surprise during the monologue, but most of the guesses had assumed that it would be a politician beloved by Hollywood. Colbert subverted expectations: It was instead a politician reviled — or at least looked down upon — by that same audience.
What a fascinating and destabilizing note to begin an evening on. Colbert heaped scorn on the president and his administration — but he also needled, provoked, and challenged the audience in front of him, too. A couple of his remarks in the opening monologue were so niche, about Hollywood, that it would fly right over most viewers’ heads — but it seemed to be important to him to establish a tone that let no one, and nothing, off the hook.
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This was clearest in the way that Colbert praised and then joked about diversity in Hollywood. When he pronounced this years’ Emmy nominees as the most diverse in history, he mocked the audience for its dutiful, self-serving applause — “That’s impressive. I did not know you could applaud while patting yourself on the back at the same time.” And after singling out a few stellar African-American actors, he tacked on Bill Maher’s name to the list, as an acrid, sly jab at the HBO political comedian’s use of the n-word to describe himself earlier this year.
Colbert advanced the idea, in his monologue, that whether we like him or not, Donald Trump is the television star of the year — every show was influenced by or responded to this former reality TV host, who himself watches a prodigious amount of TV. And, a little jokingly and a little seriously, Colbert held the audience responsible for where Trump ended up. He chided them for not just giving the man the Emmy he so clearly wanted. “I thought you people loved morally compromised antiheroes!” he said, in mock seriousness.
And then — almost as if it really was just another “The Daily Show” segment, when Colbert was a correspondent — Colbert cut to a clip from the debates, where Trump makes a point of declaring that he still wants that stupid Emmy. (Hyland, in a charming moment, laughed so much and so incredulously that the camera cut to her.) It’s natural to see Colbert throwing to a prepared clip, but it is unheard of for the Emmys: For a quick second, the entire viewing audience was handed the textual evidence for Colbert’s argument.
In an illustration of how confident Colbert is when he can wrap his commentary in a nonthreatening format, the monologue ultimately had fewer jabs about politics than the opening number, “Everything is Better on TV.” As Colbert sang and danced his way through a backlot, “Veep,” “The Americans,” “This Is Us,” and extras dressed like Handmaids, he laid the criticism on thick: jibing about transgender service members in the military, American health care, and the Trump administration cozying up with Russians. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, playing her “Veep” character, snapped an observation that a president who wasn’t loved by Nazis might be a fun one to have around.
With all of this clear criticism of the Trump administration — and even less tolerance for conservative talking points than ever before — it was curious, and possibly even frustrating, that Colbert would allow the Emmys to become a platform for what may or may not be the Sean Spicer Rehabilitation Tour. (Spicer was on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” this past week, which indicates an attempt to improve his public image.) Spicer was so spectacularly bad at his job — a job that the president’s impulsive doublespeak made nearly impossible — that he had been the laughingstock of conservative, liberal, political, and apolitical media for months (eclipsed only barely by Anthony Scaramucci, who has also started a comeback tour). Colbert offering him a platform — I mean, a podium — lends free publicity to a press secretary who tried to make excuses for Trump’s toxic agenda.
But I’m not convinced that Colbert lent him that podium to praise him. If anything, Spicer’s sheepish return to the spotlight was immediately the night’s most embarrassingly desperate attempt to be cool — in a room full of people who do nothing except try to convince other people that they are cool. Spicer is pathetic, and Colbert’s cut to him seemed to highlight it, not detract from it; even his one line, delivered with a painful lack of charm, mocked no one except Spicer himself. Maybe Colbert has his eyes on the bigger picture, too. Maybe by bringing Spicer in on a podium, he is asking TV to confront the thing they are (rightfully) mocking — and asking Spicer, a man who volunteered to serve in Trump’s xenophobic, racist administration, to face the sheer glittering majesty of this year’s Emmy nominees. TV is, after all, supposed to bring us together.
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NEW YORK — Over the past 2½ months, President Trump has retweeted to the more than 30 million followers of his personal Twitter account these pieces of highbrow social media content:
●An animated GIF of him executing some WWE-style ground-and-pound on a CNN avatar.
●A cartoon meme of a “Trump train” running over a hapless CNN reporter.
●On Sunday, another doctored GIF of him hitting a golf ball into Hillary Clinton so hard she falls over.
Do these retweets equal an endorsement? For Trump, they probably do, but the White House isn’t saying, and it doesn’t really matter.
Given a boost by the tweeter in chief, the attacks on Trump’s enemies, content dredged from the depths of the Internet’s mud pits, are amplified, spread virally and instantly transmitted into the center of the nation’s daily political discourse — “liked” by hundreds of thousands of Trump’s supporters and seen by countless more in breathless news reports.
Much has been made of the president’s use of social media to dominate the media bandwidth during the campaign and, since taking office, his penchant to lay bare his id in real time despite repeated efforts by White House handlers to curtail him. On Sunday, Trump, in his own words, mocked North Korea’s Kim Jong Un on Twitter, calling the dictator with a growing nuclear weapons arsenal the “Rocket Man.”
Yet if Trump’s bombast on social media has alarmed foreign leaders, confused Congress and moved financial markets, his strategy of retweeting memes and GIFs has a different effect, media experts said. At a time when Trump’s public approval ratings have tumbled and he is taking fire from conservatives for flirting with bipartisanship on immigration, the president’s promotion of the outlandish content — created and distributed by his most ardent supporters — aims to rally his far-right political base.
“Last week, he met with Democrats, and a lot in the base were kind of pissed off,” said Nikki Usher, an assistant professor at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. “Now he’s signaling to them: ‘I found this stuff [online]. Isn’t it cool? I’m listening to you.’ It’s a reaffirmation to the base that they really matter.”
The tactics strike Trump’s critics as distasteful at best and harmful at worst; some liberals and media columnists have accused the president of promoting violence against reporters and sexism against female politicians. The Twitter user whose Clinton golf GIF Trump retweeted Sunday has an account handle that relies on the phonetic spelling of the f-word.
Despite the howls of outrage, Trump can claim a win, Usher said. The Internet, she said, has produced a “remix culture” in which anyone can produce content. By that measure, some of the content Trump is retweeting is “brilliant” as parody or comedy and is clearly intended as a joke, she said.
“The mainstream media and progressives say this stuff is threatening and dangerous and calls for violence, but then Trump supporters say these folks can’t even take a joke,” she said. “He wins in that regard. And the other appeal is that members of his base have a horrible, deep-seated hatred of Hillary Clinton.”
In addition to the golf GIF, Trump retweeted other memes Sunday. One showed his face with stock market arrows pointing up, another showed a Trump train plowing through a snowstorm, and a third showed an image of the U.S. electoral map covered in Republican red with the words “keep it up Libs. This will be 2020.”
Critics said Trump has not only coarsened and debased the nation’s dialogue, but also that he has promoted xenophobia and anti-Semitism. During the campaign, Trump promoted a meme of Clinton with the words “most corrupt candidate ever” emblazoned on a six-pointed star of David. As president, Trump has retweeted users who, journalists later discovered, have made other racist or anti-Semitic statements.
To Macon Phillips, who served as the White House’s director of new media under President Barack Obama, Trump’s choices of what he retweets demonstrate a lack of interest in growing his base and at the same time highlight the narrow political space in which the president has room to operate.
“The fact that he routinely retweets people with a checkered history and viewpoints reflects the slim pickings he has to go with” of supporter-created pro-Trump content, Phillips said.
It is not clear whether Trump retweets the memes himself or relies on aides, such as White House social media director Dan Scavino. Nor is it known how Trump discovers the material, given that he follows just 45 people on Twitter from his personal account.
Trump aides did not respond to a request for comment.
In recent months, Trump has flubbed a couple of retweets. In one case, he retweeted and thanked a supporter who does not appear to be real person but whose persona was invented to promote a Trump-related apparel store. In another case last month, Trump retweeted a user from Britain who called him a “fascist.”
Asked about the president’s retweets Sunday, Republican strategist David Urban replied: “I’m not going to judge what’s appropriate and inappropriate with the president. Retweets do not equal endorsement. I think it says in the bottom of this tweet.”
There is, in fact, no such disclaimer.
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