After a month-long hiatus, Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show. Questioning if he had missed anything during August, the late-night host played a rapid-fire montage of Donald Trump’s actions while Stewart was away.
These actions included rolling back childhood vaccine requirements, threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center, and attacking mail-in voting. “God, it never ends with this dude Trump,” Stewart remarked. “I’ve never seen one person work so much and fix so little. It’s exhausting.”
Discussing the dire situation aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln—which Trump has refused to acknowledge—Stewart noted that the president’s “relentless denial of reality” is an element “eating away at the foundational load-bearing structures that hold this country together.” He also addressed the escalating trade war with Canada and Trump’s decision to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America.
“That’s not how things work!” Stewart exclaimed. “You don’t settle complicated international agreements by simply writing a new name on a map and expecting everyone to comply.”
Later in the monologue, Stewart likened Trump aide Natalie Harp to incarcerated Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, pointing to the viral trailer for Nathan Fielder’s upcoming documentary, You Can See Everything. “Donald Trump has an aide whose sole purpose is to reinforce his warped reality,” Stewart explained, before sharing a news clip about Harp sending Trump “love letters.”
“This is unbelievable,” Stewart said. “The outside world is somehow fed into this woman—a single conduit. From there, she acts as the filter for all the information directly fed into Donald Trump’s psyche.” Stewart then played a fake documentary trailer that superimposed Trump’s face onto Fielder’s body, with Holmes asking, “Why would I deceive you? There’s no reason for me to do that.”
