Jon Stewart has officially joined in on the mass social-media speculation about President Donald Trump’s health.
In his first monologue of The Daily Show’s new season, Stewart argued Monday that concerns around Trump’s supposedly impending death may be warranted.
“Jesus, Grandpa!” Stewart yelled out in response to pictures of Trump’s bruised hand. “Put ‘em away. Holy s--t!”
“And what’s with the make-up?” Stewart said. “It’s not like you can treat leprosy at Sephora.”
“By the way, may I remind you: these are just the parts poking out that we can see. I bet everything on that body not covered by clothes is all f---ed up right now," Stewart added.
“For all we know, the guy’s gone full Grimace. Blotchy hands, puffy ankles.”
The White House claims the bruised hands are the result of Trump shaking so many people’s hands, combined with his use of aspirin. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, had previously said that he has “chronic venous insufficiency,” to explain his swollen ankles.
Turning to Trump’s legs, Stewart showed a clip of The Daily Beast’s chief content officer, Joanna Coles, describing Trump’s cankles in a recent members-only video.
In what Stewart described as the style of a “world-weary Brit,” the clip showed Coles saying his “ankles, swollen and straining over his Oxfords, aren’t just unsightly cankles. They’re flashing neon signs of a body under pressure.”
“Put that Attenborough right into my veins!” Stewart said.
Doing an impression of nature documentary narrator David Attenborough, Stewart joked, “The aging president struggles to keep up with the herd. And as night falls, it’s clear: The lions will eat well tonight.... on a menu of cankles au poivre.”
Jokes about Trump’s bruises aside, Stewart sympathized with the “#TrumpIsDead” hashtag that went viral on X in late August.
“It does say something about the ubiquity of Donald Trump in our lives that we don’t hear from him for 20 minutes and we’re like, ‘He’s dead!’” Stewart joked.
He added, “‘How do you know he’s dead?’ ‘Well, it’s been seven minutes since the word ‘Newscum’ has come up on my feed...’”
“Well, of course, Trump didn’t die in office. But I wouldn’t put it past him—trying to take credit for something Biden had already accomplished,” Stewart joked, cutting to a picture of a lost-looking Joe Biden at last year’s disastrous televised debate against Trump.
“Trump is alive,“ Stewart admitted, ”Although I definitively would not go so far as to say alive and kicking."
The Daily Show host went on to blame “our superficial Instagram culture” for giving people “unrealistic expectations... about the amount of fluid our bodies should be able to clear subcutaneously.”
“These really are not medical appraisals,” he added. “It’s just more like insults, like ‘Hey, according to the Mayo Clinic, why are his eyes so f---ing lumpy?’”
