Late last night,  Donald Trump, our very unpresidential president, posted an AI-generated video showing him tossing Steven Colbert into a dumpster in yet another childish outburst mocking his enemies.

The video, posted to Truth Social, shows Colbert onstage for the taping of the last episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” before Trump walks up behind him, grabs him by his shoulders, and tosses him into a dumpster.

Trump closes the lid to the dumpster and starts dancing to the Village People’s “YMCA.”

What a piece of trash, Trump is.

Trump had already celebrated the end of The Late Show, which concluded on Thursday night, calling him  “like a dead person” and a “total jerk.”

It was hard not to contrast this to another time when CBS canceled a politically provocative show and the response of another president.

In the late 1960s, no one pushed boundaries better than the Smothers Brothers, Dick and Tommy, on their CBS show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

The topics are as timely today.

So was the pushback.

CBS would routinely try to censor segments of the show, but by doing so, they were undermining the very audience that had made it a hit.

It wasn’t long before Network bosses were getting complaints from top politicians.

Including the President, Lyndon Johnson, who was endlessly taken to task by the brothers for his handling of Vietnam.

Yet, Johnson was big enough to understand the role of satire in a healthy society. In a letter written to the Smothers Brothers dated November 8, 1968, he wrote:

“To be genuinely funny at a time when the world is in a crisis is a task that would tax the talents of a genius; to be consistently fair when standards of fair play are constantly questioned demands the wisdom of a saint.

“It is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists. You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate the humor in our lives.”

 

That was the America of my youth that I witnessed and believed in. The society was flawed, it was messy, and we were getting mired in Vietnam.

However, we had a president in Lyndon Johnson who sought to eliminate poverty, reduce inequality, and enhance the quality of life for all Americans through social welfare programs and civil rights legislation.

Everything Trump is dismantling now.

Trump is perverting Johnson’s War on Poverty and turning against the people,  depriving them of resources, finances, and health care.

Today, we are watching what we never thought possible—the transformation of our democracy into a dictatorship.

What a dumpster fire Donnie is.