A month after he found himself in the middle of the Capitol riot melee, The Daily Show correspondent Jordan Klepper returned to the scene of the crime this week to confront the handful of Donald Trump supporters protesting his second impeachment.
He began the piece by noting that Washington, D.C. is “a bit different” than the last time he was there, with National Guard troops in the streets and fencing surrounding the U.S. Capitol Building where the proceedings were taking place. “And the thousands of screaming MAGA folks is down to… two.”
Without the typical hordes of maskless Trump fanatics, Klepper had his work cut out for him. But he still managed to wring some laughs out of a woman in a faded Trump-Pence T-shirt who claimed that it was actually “leftists” and “antifa” who led the mob on January 6th.
“I was here and it seemed like a lot of people were Trump supporters,” Klepper pushed back. “A thousand people broke into the Capitol, erected a noose outside, and tried to kill the Speaker of the House and the vice president.”
When she accused him of “literally” making that up and offered to show him some videos, he deadpanned, “I’m not going to give you my email.”
With almost no Trump supporters to embarrass, Klepper was forced to conduct much more civil interviews with reasonable D.C. residents and finally, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who led the impeachment prosecutors for Democrats the first time around.
“Is accountability really America’s thing?” Klepper asked Schiff. “I mean, we’re better at, like, barbecue and wrap-around sunglasses.”
“Well, I think that the lack of priority on accountability over the last few years is why we’re in this predicament,” Schiff answered. Asked if Congress should go back to doing “more important things” like “stopping the space lasers that are causing all the wildfires,” the congressman took the opportunity to denounce those, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), as being into “kooky, crazy, batshit conspiracy stuff.”
And when Schiff urged Republican senators to “find the courage” to convict Trump, Klepper said that would mean “banking it on the courage of someone like Ted Cruz,” adding, “Good luck with that.”
“If I was going to bank on that I’d be bankrupt a long time ago,” Schiff joked.
“I was gonna say, he won’t even stand up for his wife, let alone the country,” Klepper replied.
For more, listen to The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper on The Last Laugh podcast.
