Watch Triumph the Insult Comic Dog Explain Trump’s Victory on ‘Colbert’
Donald Trump‘s unexpected victory in the presidential election on Tuesday sent pollsters and pundits back to the drawing board to determine why so many of them failed to correctly predict the election’s outcome. Stephen Colbert brought Triumph the Insult Comic Dog onto The Late Show to diagnose the problem. “It’s the elitists that didn’t see it,” the smart-mouthed canine puppet explained. “You underestimated Trump. It turns out only Donald Trump was in touch with the American people – though most of them against their will.”
Triumph’s election postmortem was full of similarly barbed quips. “People are blaming the election on voters being stupid, which I think is very unfair to the racists,” he deadpanned. Shifting his focus to the statistician Nate Silver, one of many who failed to predict a Trump victory, Triumph joked, “They’ve come up with a plan to fix their problems: they’re upping their margin of error to 100 percent.”
The Comic Dog also speculated about what a Trump presidency might look like. “It’s going to be exciting – we’ll finally get to see Donald’s plan to destroy ISIS,” he said excitedly. “Which I assume is to buy it and run it like one of his casinos.”
For those in despair about Trump’s win, Triumph offered a small consolation. “The finger on the button is going to be really, really tiny,” he said. “So [Trump] might miss it, or he’ll have to press it so many times he’ll just give up.”
Conan O’Brien co-created Triumph with Robert Smigel, who voices and operates the puppet, in the 1990s. Earlier this year, Triumph aired an election special on Hulu and crashed the Democratic and Republican conventions. “What’s important to me is that Triumph doesn’t have my politics,” Smigel told Rolling Stone in August. “I keep Triumph making fun of everybody.”
Several factors may have contributed to Donald Trump winning the presidency. Watch here.