After a year of far greater success than many expected, Bernie Sanders on Tuesday effectively ended his campaign for president and endorsed Hillary Clinton. Stephen Colbert marked the end of Sanders’s run with his Hunger Games parody, donning his Caesar Flickerman–style Hungry for Power Games outfit on The Late Show one more time, giving the Sanders campaign a truly weird sendoff.
"Tributes, assemble!" Colbert said, to an image of Sanders, Clinton, and Donald Trump. "Oh, so few remain. But the bar is closing, and America has to go home with someone."
Colbert noted that Sanders’s campaign has, in reality, been over for months, but the senator had stuck it out until just now (to influence the Democratic platform). "Sadly, today, we lost the bravest tribute of all," Colbert said. "A man we actually lost months ago — but who courageously kept pretending not to be dead."
The segment only gets stranger from there, as Colbert ate Sanders’s name out of caviar ("I’m going to regret that," he said, disgusted) and praised Sanders’s sex appeal. It’s a delightfully bizarre sendoff — one fitting of the overall weirdness of 2016 and the presidential campaign.
