“Hi sharks,” Jon Stewart pitched during Monday’s episode of The Daily Show. “When I saw the President of the United States starting out on tariffs and ending up on dolls and parades and pencils, I thought, there’s gotta be a better way to help Americans figure out which of the things it’s OK to get upset about and which things are just him fucking off. So, I invented this chart.”
Prompted by President Donald Trump‘s massive tariffs to his insistence Americans ration their dolls and pencils, the late-night host propped up a simple chart to help the nation make sense of when Trump’s increasingly chaotic statements are a valid concern or an attempt to distract the media and public.
“I’m trying very hard in this new Trump flood-the-zone media ecosystem strategy to not get too high or low, to not take the bait, to find things in my life that give me pleasure or peace,” said Stewart before getting swayed by the president’s announcement that he wanted to reopen Alcatraz as a federal prison, exclaiming: “What the fuck is that?” Stewart soon apologized, “I’m sorry. The chart was supposed to prevent this kind of over emotional digression.”
After vowing to “do better,” Stewart pointed to an AI-generated image of Trump that was shared on his and White House social media accounts over the weekend. The host followed up with a clip of an MSNBC anchor explaining why the president could not be actually be selected as the head of the Catholic Church. “You see what you’re doing to people, Trump? MSNBC’s got to waste valuable airtime fact-checking your fucking nonsense,” said Stewart before quipping: “Time they could have spent frowning, sighing, and rolling their eyes.”
Still, the exasperated host pondered, “Is there anything during this chaotic news cycle that we should keep our eyes on?” before playing a footage from Trump’s recent Meet the Press interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker.
In the clip, when asked whether he needs to “uphold the Constitution of the United States as president,” Trump replied, “I don’t know.” It was a sentiment he continued to repeat when asked if every person in the U.S. has a right to due process, as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.
After marking Trump’s statement high on the chart as, “Holy shit. No this is not OK,” Stewart pointed out why it was a horrifying answer to come from a president who, like other presidents before him, swore while taking the oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
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