Schiff reminded viewers of Trump’s attacks on him. “Ever since I led his first impeachment, he’s threatened me with jail, prosecution, called me a traitor, accused me of treason… blah blah blah,” he said. Then Schiff turned directly to the camera with a message for the president.

Inside the Ed Sullivan Theatre in New York, Stephen Colbert was trying to make sense of that cataclysmic outcome in real time, both for himself and for the millions of viewers who had come to view him as an indispensable voice of comic insight and illumination.