Jon Stewart has ripped into the president for blatantly lying about the conditions of the USS Lincoln.
On Tuesday’s episode of The Daily Show, the late-night host exposed Donald Trump’s consistent lies and lack of transparency about the USS Abraham Lincoln, the ship that experienced a nightmare deployment for months amid the Iran war.
Stewart said the ship’s stories resonated with him “deeply,” adding about Trump, “I have never seen one person work so much and fix so little.”
“That’s the plight of the USS Lincoln,” he began.
“Five thousand U.S. sailors and Marines serving on the USS Lincoln, stepping on dry land for the first time in more than nine months. The once-gleaming aircraft carrier docking in Thailand after 286 days at sea, covered in rust after a record-setting deployment,” he continued.
Stewart displayed the many horrific pictures of the aircraft carrier, which sailors described in harrowing terms.
The late-night host said that the rusted ship is “a metaphor.”
“This ship—a symbol of American might, ingenuity, technical know-how, patriotic determination—laid low by prolonged exposure to relentless, corrosive elements and reckless mismanagement,” he continued. “It’s not the USS Lincoln. It’s not. It’s just us. It’s us.”
“This is what we look like as Americans inside after 18 months of this presidency,” said Stewart, in a scathing remark about Trump’s second term.
He then turned to Trump’s blatant agenda of lying about the carrier, one shared by his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth. The administration has routinely denied widespread reports of rust, dwindling supplies, inadequate and inedible food, and a lack of maintenance onboard. Trump has gone as far as to say the Lincoln is “beautifully maintained.”
“People on the Lincoln, they say it’s beautifully maintained and beautifully taken care of,” the president told reporters.
Stewart retorted, “It is obviously not.”
“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 doesn’t,” the host concluded. “And it’s this relentless denial of reality that is just one of the elements eating away at the foundational, load-bearing structures that hold this country together.”
