Jon Stewart Discovers That ‘The Daily Show’ Audience Isn’t Ready to Laugh at This Topic
There’s absolutely nothing funny about the Trump administration’s choice of targets in their aggressive and unconstitutional deportation campaign. Believe Jon Stewart, he tried.
Right now, America is in the midst of a constitutional crisis because of the federal government’s mass abduction of residents, both illegal and otherwise, for transportation to prisons in Central America without due process. While President Trump claims that he has directed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to first round up gang members, violent criminals and “Hannibal Lectors,” as he calls them, many of the actual targets of this large-scale, extrajudicial expulsion have been legal residents with no criminal history, including children as young as two years old and kids suffering from cancer.
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During tonight’s episode of The Daily Show, weekly host Stewart found that there simply aren’t any laughs to be found in a report from CNN that the Trump administration has deported multiple children who are American citizens, including a seven-year-old, a two-year-old with a pregnant mother and a four-year-old who is currently undergoing treatment for metastatic cancer.
“Oh my f---ing God,” Stewart coughed out while his audience audibly gasped at the infographic highlighting the deported American children identified in the CNN report. “That’s who we’re deporting? A kid with cancer? Trump really doesn’t know how the Make-a-Wish Foundation works, does he? The cancer kid is the one who gets the wish, Trump!”
After a gut-wrenching silence, Stewart cut the tension with an overplayed, “Oh, I’m sorry,” before admitting, “The audience will go with you on a lot, but there are certain moments when I feel their physical pain.”
This week, The Daily Show will seek to summarize and satirize the first 100 days of President Trump's second term in a feature they’re facetiously calling, "Trump’s Final Week of his Second First 100 Days.” While it’s the job of Stewart’s writing staff to find and highlight the many mind-melting absurdities of the second Trump administration through its tumultuous first few months, they will likely continue to have difficulty in getting audiences with any humanity left in them to giggle at the thought of a sick child stuck in a Honduran prison because of Trump’s heartlessness and incompetence.
In Trump’s much darker second term, satirists will have to dig deeper than they did in 2017 to find a comedic way to frame the many human rights abuses that America is currently committing. They’ll have to work a hell of a lot harder to get the job done than Trump did when made the deportation list.
