Before he started beating Fallon in the ratings and replaced Jon Stewart as the ombudsman of late night, Stephen Colbert spent a decade playing the very white, very American “Stephen Colbert”: the kind of man you might now see defending Donald Trump on Fox News…or defending Donald Trump during White House press briefings…or defending Donald Trump during an interrogation by Robert Mueller. But like Superman jumping into a phone booth and removing his navy suit to reveal—huh!—another navy suit, Colbert stepped up to save us. Not by parodying far-right hypocrisy—by confronting it. GQ talked to the Man of the Year about pretending to be the person you really are, why Trump is a bad talk-show guest, and if this too shall pass.

GQ: It felt like this year was terrible for everyone. But in the context of world history, how bad is it, really?

Stephen Colbert: America has made mistakes before this—I would say the Dred Scott decision's still worse than what we have going on right now.

So, Trump: better than Dred Scott.

That's a low bar to shuffle over. But yes, Trump is better than the Dred Scott decision. Trump's election is a stone thrown into the pond that just will never stop rippling. I think it's going to be generations before we recover from whatever it is he's doing.

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But you think we will recover?

I hope that we will. I don't know how. I don't know how we recover from choosing that man to be the leader of this country. I don't know how we recover our ethical or moral standing in the world, because this is an abdication of an American moral philosophy. We've completely abandoned it.

Watching Obama be so gracious and Trump be so disgusting on Inauguration Day was just like, “How did we go from that to this?”

Seeing Donald Trump represent the United States is like hearing little children say filthy words. It shocks you and makes you wonder how this came about.

It feels like you're here at exactly the right time. Not that Trump was destined to be president and you were destined to take him on or something, but does it feel like you're in the position you're in for a reason?

I don't have any such grand picture of myself. But I'm grateful to have a purpose now. To know what I want to do every day, which is to keep my eye on what's happened for the last 24 hours and talk about it. The night Trump was elected, that live show was the hardest show I ever did. Just the reality of what we were experiencing in real time with the audience, and sharing with them…that was the hardest thing I ever did. But afterward I had my senior editorial staff come down, and I said, “Well, if you were wondering why you have this job, now you know.”

How has Trump's election changed your relationship with the audience?

Perhaps they sense how grateful I am to be onstage with them. I need this job. I get the same sort of release that I think the audience is looking for.

How do you keep perspective when you have to deal with things in those 24-hour chunks?

Oh, my wife and kids. I'm old for somebody who does one of these jobs—I got this gig at 51, and I did my other show at 41. Guys like Conan got it when they were 30 or something. But I already was married, with kids, and had a value system that was really centered around the love of your daily life. That's what calms me down. Like the moon this morning—the beautiful half-moon above the trees on a crisp morning, and above all of the clouds the stars forever shine. It gives you a sense that you're just one small thing. You're not changing anything; you're reacting to it. You might be changing people's days, but it also helps to keep you from taking yourself too seriously.