Jon Stewart
After a month away, Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show on Tuesday evening with a quick recap of Donald Trump’s low-key actions in the should-be slow month of August: rolling back childhood vaccine requirements, attacking mail-in voting, threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center and suggesting he would bomb American allies such as Oman, as well as all of Iran.That would be the plight of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the huge aircraft carrier carrying more than 5,000 US sailors and marines, which recently docked in Thailand, rusted and corroded by the elements, after 286 days at sea.
“It’s not!” Stewart exclaimed. “The actual Abraham Lincoln is in better shape than this ship! A ‘beautifully maintained, beautifully taken care of’ ship doesn’t look like the abandoned bridge near my high school where we used to smoke weed.
“It’s this, the relentless denial of reality that is one of the elements eating away at the foundational load-bearing structures that hold this country together,” he added.
The other corrosive element? The memes. “Please make it stop,” a deeply fatigued Stewart pleaded before playing the clip, posted to official government accounts, of Trump crossing out the name “Lake Ontario” and writing “Lake America” in Sharpie amid escalating trade tensions with Canada. “You can’t, that’s not how things work!” Stewart shouted. “You don’t settle complicated international agreements by writing just a new name on the map and expecting everyone to just follow along.
“Why are we trolling them?” he wondered of the Trump administration’s needling of Canada. “Is that the plan? To troll them into submission?”
Later in the segment, Stewart explored one of the factors contributing to Trump’s seemingly infinite levels of delusion. “Donald Trump has an aide whose whole job is to reinforce his warped reality,” he explained before a news clip about the White House aide Natalie Harp sending Trump “love letters”.
“This is unbelievable,” Stewart continued. “The outside world is somehow fed into this woman – a single conduit. And from there, she is the filter to all the information that is directly fed into Donald Trump’s psyche.” Stewart then played a doctored version of the viral trailer for Nathan Fielder’s upcoming documentary on the disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes with Trump’s face superimposed on to Fielder’s body, while the convicted fraudster asks: “Why would I deceive you? There’s no reason for me to do that.”
Jimmy Kimmel
Kimmel also took a moment to shout out the haters: “There are those who said we wouldn’t last this long. There are even those who use the regulatory might of the FCC to unconstitutionally try to make sure we didn’t last this long. But we did it the hard way, Brendan” – that would be Brendan Carr, Trump’s head of the FCC – “and we are still here.”
Kimmel then briefly recapped where he had left the country when he last addressed his audience in June – algae-infested Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, war with Iran, high gas prices, inflation, Mitch McConnell either alive or dead “and nobody seemed to have any idea which. No one still seems to. I guess they don’t even care any more? Because they seem to have stopped trying to find out.”
Three months later, not much had changed. “Are you telling me the president of the United States had three full months and spent $20m and couldn’t even get a pool cleaned?” Kimmel quipped. “How are we supposed to win the war in Iran if we can’t even win the war against algae?”
More recently, Trump “pumped out a gusher of AI-generated slop” in a way “that almost felt like he was welcoming me back to work”. This Sunday alone, Trump posted 37 times on Truth Social, including a video of himself renaming the state of New Mexico “New America”. (The federal government, for what it’s worth, has no authority to do that.) “Listen, if there was a new America, we’d all go there immediately,” Kimmel joked.
“As if the people in New Mexico don’t already have enough on their plate, trying to spell the word ‘Albuquerque’. Now they have to deal with this.”