Jon Stewart joked that the public may be missing an obvious connection between Donald Trump’s gold monument to himself and the week’s headlines.
On Monday’s The Daily Show, Stewart said the newly minted 22-foot gold statue at Trump’s Florida golf resort isn’t the golden calf from the biblical story about God’s wrath toward idolatry. “It is a full-grown cow,” Stewart said, in a clip of the show posted to YouTube with the title, “Hantavirus Is Not the Next Covid, But Try Telling That to the News Media.”
“That is a golden cow with a gold load in its…mmmm,” the host trailed off, making a cow-groaning noise and moo-ing.
“But I don’t want to suggest this is actually a case of false idolatry,” Stewart went on. “If it was, God would probably be punishing us the same way he did in The Bible with a plague. And I mean, that’s not happening,” he said sarcastically, cutting to a clip of news coverage about the hantavirus outbreak.
“Breaking tonight, the deadly outbreak of a rare rodent virus on board a cruise ship,” a news anchor says in a montage. “The race to contain a suspected deadly virus outbreak,” says another. “The public health threat so dangerous…” more clips tease, “Nightmare at sea,” “Cruise chaos,” and “A cruise from hell.”
The show cuts back to Stewart, donning the top of a hazmat suit. “What? Another pandemic? Are we going to have to start washing our hands again? Or freaking the f--- out in a Target?” he added, rolling the viral clip of a woman who destroyed a display of masks at a Target in 2021 after falling for the QAnon conspiracy. “Good times,” Stewart quipped when the clip was over.
“Although I have to say, on the plus side, I can’t believe I still fit into my old hazmat suit.”
Stewart is one of many critics of Trump’s “Real Deal,” $450,000 statue, who drew biblical parallels to the “golden calf” story from Exodus, which ends with God inflicting a plague on worshippers of the golden statue.
The evangelical pastor and spiritual adviser, Mark Burns, hired to oversee the statue for Trump, insisted that comparing Trump’s statue to the story was “blasphemous” in an interview on LBC. “I don’t know anybody who worships Donald Trump as a God,” he said, even after MAGA evangelicals gathered to “bless” the monument last week. “It represents the miracle of God, that’s what it represents.”
Despite Stewart’s jokes on Monday, he argued that most of the “panic” about the virus is media-manufactured. “Some people may get pretty sick but forget COVID. This ain’t no pandemic. Hell, this hantavirus ain’t even in monkeypox territory. But I guess reality don’t sell papers.”
More than a dozen Americans who were aboard the MV Hondius when it left Argentina for Spain on April 1 are being held at the country’s only federally funded quarantine center after disembarking from the doomed voyage early Monday morning, during which three passengers died from the virus.
“I want to make the timeline clear to everybody,” Stewart said on his show on Monday. “We found out hanatvirus had been on a cruise ship. Monday through Thursday, expert upon expert, scientist upon scientist, very transparently explained why this illness, while a serious illness, is a low-level public health threat. Their words went a long way to easing the concerns of a curious public.”
He concluded, “And Lord knows the news can’t let that happen.”
