In his first episode of The Late Show since the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump on July 13, host Stephen Colbert took three minutes on Monday to open the show with a sobering message.
In light of the darkness, the United States came close to a great tragedy on Saturday when at a political rally down in Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old gunman shot and nearly killed a former President and the man who today became the 2024 Republican nominee. And my immediate reactions when I saw this on Saturday, were horror at what was unfolding, relief that Donald Trump had lived, and frankly, grief for my beautiful country. And then fresh horror as we learned that attendees had also been shot, one of whom died at the rally.
So as we've done many times in the past when some tragic event has shocked the nation, I'm starting the show tonight talking at the desk, though I could just as easily start the show moaning on the floor, because how many times do we need to learn the lesson that violence has no role in our politics, that the entire objective of a democracy is to fight out our differences with, as the saying goes, a ballot, not a bullet.
Now, right after the attack, a young friend of mine, he texted me saying, 'how is this happening in America in 2024?' And I understood his shock, but I'm old enough that one of my earliest memories is sitting in a dark room with my sister, watching my parents' little black and white TV, and seeing Bobby Kennedy's coffin on that slow train from New York down to Washington. And whether the result of extremist politics or mental illness that violence is with us still from the shooting of a GOP baseball practice that seriously injured Steve Scalise, to the plot to kidnap and kill Governor Gretchen Whitmer, to the hammer attack that nearly killed Paul Pelosi, to the horrors of January 6th...to this most recent attack.
And the man who fired the shots seemed to have conflicted or confusing motivations, at least by the standards of today's stark left and right divide. Someone barely out of boyhood, who reportedly donated to a Democratic group in 2021, then registered as a Republican that same year. So we may never understand his motivation, nor is that necessarily our job.
Our job as American citizens is to reject violence and violent rhetoric in this time of crisis, however hard we want to fight for our ideas.
And in that regard, not only is violence evil, it is useless. As I quoted when Representative Steve Scalise was shot, 'violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.' Violence or even calls for violence invalidate any ideas.
This week in Milwaukee and next month in Chicago, these conventions will be about the candidates who are nominated, but they're really about the ideas that these two candidates represent and the future America they want to lead us to.
In the wake of this attack on Saturday, many Americans, on both sides of the aisle, from President Biden to Speaker Johnson are calling on all of us to change how we see each other, how we treat each other, how we talk to each other. And that may or may not happen, but those conflicting ideas will remain the same. So this week we're going to do our best to talk about those ideas, the people who represent those ideas and many other things with guests. And who knows if we're lucky. Maybe some fart jokes. This is the late show.