“We had a really nice show planned for you,” Trevor Noah told his audience at the top of Thursday night’s Daily Show. “Very civil, very calm. And then, in the middle of the day, Hurricane Trump happened, again.”
After playing a montage of the best one-liners from the 77-minute White House press conference that Chuck Todd called “extraordinary” and Jake Tapper called “unhinged,” Noah said, “I can’t play the entire press conference. We only have 30 minutes and he spoke for, like, six days.”
“So let’s instead focus on some of the moments where Trump actually completed a thought,” the host continued. “Starting with the most important part of his presidency: how much he won.”
Early in the question and answer portion of the presser, Trump was “called out” for falsely claiming that he had the biggest Electoral College margin of victory since Ronald Reagan. “You don’t even need numbers to understand this,” Noah said. “All you need to know is the map with the two colors, that’s all you need to know.” When Trump was corrected on his facts, his excuse was, “I was given that information.”
“Oh damn!” Noah exclaimed. “I don’t know who that reporter is [it was NBC News’ Peter Alexander], but he just shoved Trump’s face in that like it was a pile of bullshit and he was training a bad dog. ‘Look what you did! Look at it! Bad Trump!’”
“You’re the president,” he continued. “That’s the information you were given? If you can’t trust your president to get the right information on a Googlable fact, then can you really trust him with the harder stuff? Which, by the way, is everything else the president of the United States has to deal with.”
Noah knew Trump’s “battle with the media” was getting to him, because by the end of the marathon session, he was “begging for a softball.” He thought he had one in Jake Turx, a reporter with the Jewish magazine Ami. But then Turx asked a question about a rise in anti-Semitic attacks that Trump thought wasn’t “fair.”
“Beyond Trump's completely botched attempt at reassuring the Jewish community,” Noah said, “what’s even more striking in that interaction, is you have a president of a democracy who thinks press is only valid when they ask him easy questions, questions that he likes. In his mind, he deserves it.”
Besides, Noah added, “That’s an easy question: ‘What are you going to do about anti-Semitism?’ We’re going to stamp it out. Done. That’s all you have to say. That’s the softest ball possible. A matzoh ball, if you will.”
Trump is an “equal-opportunity offender,” Noah said, also saving some time for “the blacks” in his press conference, most notably when he asked a black reporter if she could help set up a meeting for him with the Congressional Black Caucus.
“Are they friends of yours? Are they?” Noah said, echoing Trump. “Did you all grow up h in the hood together, huh? And while you're at it, I’ve been trying to get in touch with Frederick Douglass, can you invite him to the meeting, too? He embarrassed me bigly.”
