is getting to Trump, reading and annotating the president's tweets refuting reports of "chaos" in the White House because "there's almost nobody" home but him, then Trump's justification for shutting down the government to get his border wall. "He's right, elections do have consequences," Colbert said, "and she's called the speaker of the House."

"Trump was so angry about The Washington Post's Russia bombshell that he tweeted about their owner," Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Colbert said. The Trump-friendly National Enquirer has focused on texts between Bezos — who is getting a divorce — and his girlfriend, and Trump rubbed that in with a tweet about "Jeff Bozo." Colbert was amused: "A man with an orange face and cotton-candy hair is comparing someone else to a clown. You know themost people seem to forget is that Erdogan, against the sentiment of the vast majority of the global Muslim population, was actually supportive of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

At the time, Erdogan even penned an article for the Wall Street Journal, addressing American audiences and assuring them that Turkey was America’s “faithful ally and friend”. In this article, Erdogan described his neighbour as “the Iraqi problem” and said that it was a source of “instability and concern in the region”.

This despite the fact that Iraq had been under sanctions since 1990 that had brutalised Iraq’s population leading to the deaths of over half a million children by the mid-1990s, and even though Saddam Hussein’s ambitions were contained after the Gulf War ended in 1991. There has