The Daily Show stars admitted they didn’t initially think that the MAGA “circus” needed to be taken seriously.
In 30 F#@king Years: The Daily Show Remembers, the limited podcast series celebrating the show’s 30th anniversary, rotating hosts Jordan Klepper and Ronny Chieng sat down to discuss 30 years of The Daily Show and relive its best moments. The pair replayed one of Klepper’s first stints speaking to Trump diehards at a rally in 2015.
Chieng said that back then, a Trump presidency was perceived as a “goofy” thing, until the seriousness of the billionaire’s fanbase became increasingly evident.
“Did you come back with like, ‘Oh, this is more real than we think?’” Chieng asked Klepper.
“I’d like to say yes,” Klepper responded. “And maybe I’m sugarcoating it. I’ve had a hard time understanding the scope of the MAGA movement. Perspective is hard. What I knew was that people cared and that there was excitement. It was hard to tell, ‘Is it just the 500 people who are here to see the f---ing show?’”
Klepper said it wasn’t obvious to him at the time that what many saw as a “freak show” would turn out to be a movement that would dictate several elections.
“I think that’s what it was. It was, ‘This is a sideshow. This is a freak show.’ And the reality is, ‘Oh no... this is the circus. This is the big show,’” he said.
Chieng chimed in to say that, back then, the framing of a Trump presidency was that it was an “impossibility.”
Klepper added that pundits and politicians alike suggested that Trump was amongst the “wild candidates” that come around every once in a while, only to fade into irrelevance post-election.
Klepper has now spent over a decade in the field reporting at Trump rallies, where he speaks to the president’s supporters and, more often than not, catches them in moments of painful irony and hypocrisy.
Klepper told Obsessed: The Podcast last week, “Every time I check back into the MAGA faithful, they’re still fighting the same fight that they fought eight years ago. It seems like they’ve lost the plot.”
Speaking with Chieng, he recalled that The Daily Show team was excited at the prospect of Trump running as pure comedic fodder.
“I believe the joke was, ‘Donald Trump is running for president,’ and we were all so excited about the comedic potential of it that we were c--ming in our pants,” he joked.
“I think our reaction was really, ‘This is so comedically funny and ridiculous.’ That was our take. I think the sentiment, by most American logic, was that this was not a sustainable path.”
