The Daily Show host Jon Stewart declared that there is one glimmer of hope from the “absurdity” of President Trump’s all-out assault on late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
“I am sure you’re all f---ing exhausted by all this, to have the White House Correspondents’ dinner end in gunfire, and, somehow, that get flipped around and be an assault on, apparently, Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes,” Stewart, 63, said at the top of his podcast, The Weekly Show, on Wednesday.
“That’s the land of absurdity we find ourselves in, in today’s society,” he added.
Though the longtime Daily Show host appeared run down by President Trump’s redoubled attack on late-night, Stewart offered a silver lining.
“But you know what? There is hope,” Stewart declared. “And the hope is in the people that rise out of it.”
“I’ve always believed this: when they say Make America Great Again, Donald Trump will make America great again, just not in the way that he intended,” Stewart explained.
“The reaction to his fragility and impulsiveness and incompetence will spur people that you would not expect to rise above the madness and help to begin to rebuild the very thing that we need in this country,” he concluded before introducing his guest, Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner, who he said “may be one of those individuals.”
After the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner ended prematurely when a gunman stormed the D.C. hotel and fired shots, Donald and Melania Trump weaponized the incident to target the president’s longtime late-night adversary: Kimmel.
Two days before the shooting, Kimmel, 58, held a mock WHCA dinner monologue on his show to roast the president for not tapping a comedian to host the event. During the fiery monologue, Kimmel joked that Melania Trump had the “glow of an expectant widow.”
After the WHCA dinner shooting, the president and first lady directly called for ABC to take Kimmel off the air, calling his joke a “despicable call to violence.” Soon after, the Trump-appointed Federal Communications Chairman, Brendan Carr, began a challenge against ABC’s broadcasting licenses.
It is the second time Carr, 47, has threatened the broadcaster’s licenses, but the first time he’s taken direct action.
Kimmel offered no apologies for the joke in his first monologue after the WHCA dinner.
“It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination,” Kimmel declared on Monday. “And they know that.”
Instead, Kimmel said it was a joke at the president’s age, 79, and the couple’s two-decade age gap. The following day, Kimmel hastily pointed to Trump’s own mockery of his 24-year age gap with the first lady.
On Tuesday, Trump mentioned that his parents had been married for 63 years during a welcoming speech for King Charles and Queen Camilla.
“That’s a record we won’t be able to match,” he said to his wife of 21 years.
Kimmel immediately pounced on the hypocrisy. “Wait a minute, did he just make a joke about his death?” Kimmel said, feigning shock. “My God. He should be fired for that.”
