Yesterday, we wrote about Donald Trump’s nonsense words about how he trusts his gut over science and facts and data. “One of the problems that a lot of people like myself — we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers,” he told The Washington Post. People who tell him bad news regarding the economy or climate change or basically anything else are “making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”
At the time, we noted how similar that sounded to an old bit of Stephen Colbert’s. At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 20016, Colbert said the same thing, nearly verbatim (with some embellishments). “Guys like us,” he said to George W. Bush, “… we go straight from the gut. That’s where the truth lies, right down here, in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now I know some of you are going to say ‘I did look it up and that’s not true.’ That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book.”
We weren’t the only ones to notice the similarities. During last night’s episode of Late Show, Colbert called out the apparent plagiarism. “That quote about trusting your gut over the brains of experts reminded me of someone I used to know. … Me.”
And the WHCD wasn’t the only time he used that “gut” bit. He used it in his very first-ever episode of The Colbert Report. He played the clip to prove it and then declared, “Trump stole my bit!”
“That is clear copyright infringement,” he went on. “He is stealing my anti-intellectual property! So tonight, I am officially announcing that I am suing Donald J. Trump for stealing my old character. It’s official!
So is Donald Trump a Colbert Report fan? Did that old bit slide into his subconscious and stick? Or is Trump just the full unwitting embodiment of Colbert’s over-the-top, narcissistic, ignorant right-wing caricature? We may never know, but I sure do hope Colbert follows through with his pledge to sue. Not that this is a provable infringement, of course, but with the whole heap of trouble Trump has beating down his door right now, why not throw one more pile of paperwork on top?
“You better lawyer up, buddy,” Colbert warns. “And somebody better than Rudy Giuliani, too.”
(image: YouTube)
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