Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told "Late Show" host Stephen Colbert on Tuesday that he was through talking about the birthplace of President Barack Obama.
"I don’t talk about it anymore. I talk about jobs, I talk about our veterans being horribly treated — I just don’t discuss it anymore," Trump told Colbert.
Colbert began by saying: "I’m gonna throw you up a big fat meatball for you to hit out of the park right now ... Barack Obama, born in the United States?"
When Trump declined to discuss the topic, Colbert said, "You know that meatball is now being dragged down the steps of the subway by a rat right now."
Trump in 2011 spread the false assertion that Obama was born outside the U.S., and last week sparked controversy when he didn't correct an audience member at a rally who falsely claimed Obama is Muslim.
The jokes began even before Trump made his appearance. "He is the GOP frontrunner. Who knows, one day I might be able to tell my granddkids, ‘I interviewed the last president of the United States,'" Colbert told the crowd before Trump went on.
Trump repeated his stance that the U.S. needs to do better at balancing trade and stopping undocumented immigration, and pledged to build a wall on the Mexican border. He said that if he were elected president, "it would be my great honor."
Colbert expressed his appreciation to Trump, whose controversial statements have given comics ample material to work with.
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"I want to thank you, not only for being here, I want to thank you for running for president," Colbert told Trump. "I’m not going to say this stuff writes itself, but you certainly do deliver it on time every day."
Colbert poked fun at Trump in a more than five-minute segment on his debut as "Late Show" host on Sept. 8, wolfing down Oreos after the candidate vowed to never again eat the cookie after Nabisco’s parent company told the Chicago Tribune and others it would invest in a Mexico facility rather than a Chicago plant.
