On Monday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart took on Donald Trump‘s trending moments from the campaign trail in recent days: the former president’s staged shift at a McDonald’s and his lewd comments about former pro golfer Arnold Palmer, both in Pennsylvania. However, Stewart didn’t have the same reaction to these incidents that a number of news outlets did.
Instead, the host, calling this the “fever dream” portion of the 2024 election, criticized the media for not focusing on Trump’s dangerous rhetoric like him calling elected officials the “enemy within.”
“Kamala Harris is out there sweating the details over her new opportunity economy. Trump’s just out there farting around,” Stewart said. “That’s his whole campaign right now. ‘Ave Maria’ dance party, ‘I’m going to deport everybody,’ football tailgate, blame the Jews if I lose, McDonald’s drive-thru. He’s out there having the time of his life,” Stewart added. “And the poor, sweet media — oh, poor, sweet media — they know they’re mad. They’re just not exactly sure which thing they should be maddest about anymore. But I can tell you one thing, media, it probably shouldn’t be the McDonald’s thing.”
After airing some clips of both as well as news anchors and commentators reacting to those moments, Stewart focused on something seemingly more dangerous Trump said recently. He played a clip from a recent Fox News interview in which the former president referred to the “enemy from within.”
“We have two enemies. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within,” he said. “And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.”
In case there was any question of who Trump was referring to as this “enemy from within,” Stewart aired more footage in which Trump specifically named Rep. Adam Schiff and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“We have some very bad people. We have some sick people — radical left lunatics,” Trump said. “And I think they’re the — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
“That’s not fun-loving and mischievous,” Stewart said of Trump’s remarks. “That sounded quite threatening. That’s actually worthy of some real examination.”
But the host was upset to find Republican leaders, including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and current House Speaker Mike Johnson, dismissing and mischaracterizing what Trump said.
After airing a clip of New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu on CNN saying, “He’s not talking about using the military to attack people who disagree with him politically or anything like that,” Stewart grew visibly frustrated.
“He is literally saying that! He is literally saying that! What are you talking about?” Stewart yelled, repeatedly hitting his desk with a stack of papers before throwing his hands up in the air in exasperation.
“This is what gets us to the ultimate problem, which is this: Is any of the shit Trump says real? How are we supposed to understand what’s bullshit and what isn’t? Kamala Harris, she’s gotta have an 80-page presentation on exactly how this opportunity economy is gonna function and how it’s gonna be paid for,” Stewart said. “Meanwhile, the standard for Trump is ‘emotional vicinity.’ Apparently, it doesn’t actually matter if the things he says are true.”
Stewart later added, “By the way, to all of the Republican officials who seem very confident that Trump isn’t being serious when talking about extreme measures to defeat his enemies, he’s already tried it.”
“Remember that day he tried to overthrow the government?” Stewart asked, referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. “And I know it didn’t work, but ‘attempted murder’ isn’t the same thing as ‘never tried the murder.’”
“So we are left with this surreal idea that somehow Trump’s absurdity renders him benign,” Stewart said, asking for a shorter clip, as they “do better on the TikTok,” of “one dystopian moment from this past weekend that encapsulates this potent tincture of clownish campaigning mixed with authoritarian foreboding.”
He aired a clip of Trump during his McDonald’s shift answering a question about whether he’d accept the 2024 election results by saying he would if it was a “fair” election.
On Wednesday, Stewart’s late-night colleague Jimmy Kimmel expressed similar sentiments in an interview with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough.
Scarborough asked, “What do you think, though, is happening in the country? Where you have two weeks out, and it’s one thing to just look at Donald Trump and look at some, you know, senators, but we’re actually talking about 70, 75, 80 million people.”
“I think we’re focused on the wrong things,” Kimmel said. “I think that there are certain news networks, if you want to call them that, who are lying to people. I think that there’s a certain generation, of which we are a part, who are used to watching television and seeing the white man in a suit telling what’s going on in the world and believing that what he’s saying is true. I think that is ingrained in us as Americans. We grew up with Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings. And we did not question that what they were telling us was factual. And a lot of people now are looking at Sean Hannity and whomever else and they are not questioning whether or not what they’re saying is factual and what they’re hearing is untrue. And I can understand why they think what they think because they’re being told there’s a caravan of migrants coming and then nobody’s following up at the end and saying, ‘Oh, there was no caravan of migrants coming. And Aurora, Colorado, has not been taken over by Venezuelan street gangs'”
Kimmel then brought up Trump’s claims about immigrants eating pets in Ohio. “And by the way, this story about cats and dogs being devoured by Haitian immigrants? Is preposterous. I will tell you, I’ve been dreaming. The last three nights, I’ve been just going — been going through all this craziness over and over again and it’s really starting to take a toll. Like I just… I can’t get it out of my head.”
Stewart similarly ended his segment waking up from what he thought was a dream of the Republican presidential candidate’s recent comments only to find Trump in bed next to him.
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