Stephen Colbert Once Said “I’m Liking You Too.” A Decade Later, He Was Dancing for COVID Boosters and Trump Was Still Standing.

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Watch the video above for the full comedic breakdown, starting with an AI bit of Trump tossing Colbert straight into a dumpster.

Donald Trump and Stephen Colbert weren’t always enemies. There was a time, brief as it turned out to be, when Colbert genuinely seemed to like the guy.

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Rewind to September 22, 2015. Trump sat down on The Late Show just weeks into Colbert’s new CBS gig, and the exchange was almost warm by today’s standards. Colbert pointed to a Zogby poll showing Trump at 33 percent among Republicans and told him, on air, that he wasn’t surprised at all. Trump grinned at the audience. “I’m liking him a lot,” he said. Colbert didn’t miss a beat. “I’m liking you too. I’m liking you too.”

That’s not a misquote or a clip pulled out of context. That’s Stephen Colbert, on his own show, telling Donald Trump he liked him.

Colbert went even further that same segment, thanking Trump for running at all, joking that his campaign practically wrote Colbert’s monologue material for him. He even admitted in a later interview with Face the Nation that there was “a populism to Trump that I find very appealing,” crediting Trump’s ability to stay standing while party elders tried to push him out.

None of that survived past early 2016.

What followed was one of the most dramatic on-air political reversals in modern television history. Colbert spent the better part of the next decade building entire segments around Trump hatred, culminating in moments that aged about as badly as television gets, including his infamous dance number celebrating COVID vaccine mandates while a huge share of the country was still processing lockdowns, job losses, and shuttered small businesses. The guy who once said “I’m liking you too” turned into the guy dancing on television about a public health mandate millions of Americans deeply resented.

Trump, for his part, just kept winning elections.

That’s the joke at the heart of the video above, and it opens with exactly the kind of bit that captures the absurdity of the whole decade: an AI-generated clip of Trump picking Colbert straight up and tossing him into one of those massive green industrial dumpsters you’d see behind a shopping plaza. It’s not subtle. It’s not supposed to be. Ten years of manufactured outrage deserves at least one dumpster.

The video doesn’t stop there either. A woman featured shortly after makes a point that’s hard to argue with: it’s more than a little fascist for people to be openly cheering, or attempting, political assassinations against figures like Charlie Kirk or Trump himself, regardless of how much you disagree with either man’s politics. Political violence isn’t dissent. It’s the opposite of the democratic debate people like Colbert claim to champion.

The final clip flips the entire theme toward gratitude instead of grievance. An immigrant featured near the end doesn’t hedge about what America represents. He calls it the greatest country on Earth, plainly and without qualification, adding that anyone who doesn’t understand that is, in his words, a “dunce,” the kind of dunce who might as well be living in a cave.

That’s the throughline running underneath the whole video. Colbert spent a decade performing outrage for a paycheck and a studio audience. An immigrant who actually had something to compare America against didn’t need a writers’ room to know what he was looking at.