Stephen Colbert hosted a live election night "Late Show" on Tuesday, as results began to show Donald Trump would likely succeed President Barack Obama. Amid the unpredictability, Colbert encouraged viewers to embrace bipartisan commonalities.
"I think we can agree that this has been an exhausting, bruising election for everyone," Colbert said. "We all now feel the way Rudy Giuliani looks."
"How did our politics get so poisonous?" he asked. "I think it's 'cause we overdosed — especially this year. We drank too much of the poison. You take a little bit of it so you can hate the other side, and it tastes kind of good and you like how it feels and there's a gentle high to the kind of condemnation."
Colbert, 52, recalled his childhood under a Watergate-entangled Richard Nixon administration: "When I was a kid, we didn't think about politics this much."
"Politics used to be something we thought about every four years," he said. "And that's good that we didn't think about it that much, because it left room in our lives for other things and for other people."
"But now politics is everywhere. And that takes up precious brain space we could be using to remember all the things we actually have in common," he continued. "So whether your side won or lost, we don't have to do this shit for a while."
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