Former Daily Show host Trevor Noah is finally addressing the moment he crossed over from being off Donald Trump’s radar to front and center on the president’s TV screen when he hosted the Grammy Awards.
Noah, who hosted the awards for the sixth time earlier this year, was the target of a long-winded rant by Trump in February, in which he threatened to sue the host for his on-screen joke about his ties to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The president told him, “Get ready Noah, I’m going to have some fun with you.”
The comedian dug into the online confrontation in his Netflix standup special, Joy in the Trenches, released on Tuesday.
“That last line is something: ‘Get ready, Noah, I’m going to have some fun with you!’ You know, if you’re not trying to sound like a sexual deviant, this is not the line I would recommend,” he joked.
Noah succeeded Jon Stewart on The Daily Show in 2015 and hosted The Daily Show with Trevor Noah until 2022. The South African-born comedian regularly hit Trump in typical Daily Show fashion, but the show’s insults never seemed to reach the White House, as Trump focused his social media ire on late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert.
“Turns out the president watches the Grammys,” Noah said. “It hits different when you’re in the crosshairs, I’m not gonna lie.”
“Yeah, and he was not happy. He was not happy at all. No, he had written a post, a lengthy post, giving me a Google review of my performance,” Noah added, before reading the post and roasting Trump line by line.
The comedian said he was as shocked as anyone to see Trump’s Truth Social post after he joked that Billie Eilish’s Song of the Year award “is a Grammy that every artist wants almost as much as Trump wants Greenland, which makes sense because Epstein’s island is gone, he needs a new one to hang out with Bill Clinton.”
“I hosted The Daily Show for seven years, and for seven years, news and politics in America, right? Because that’s what the show is,” Noah said. “And in that time, Donald Trump was in the news and politics all the time, and so I assumed at some point maybe he would say something about me or come after me. He didn’t, which I was happy about. I was like, great. You know, and then I left The Daily Show, and I relaxed like an idiot in a horror movie.”
He also hit Trump for declaring in his post that he had “never” been accused of visiting Epstein’s island. “Really? I was the first?” Noah joked, “Before me, no one had ever mentioned Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. I was the first. I’m the reason his name is mentioned 5,000 times in those files. I set those dominoes into place to kick them all down,” he said sarcastically.
Noah said he felt the weight of the legal threat, despite finding Trump’s comments ridiculous. “So now, I might be getting sued by the president of the United States,” he said. “I’ll be honest, I wasn’t too worried, you know, Donald Trump watches TV regularly, gets angry about what he sees, posts about it, and oftentimes he moves on. I thought something else would come along, because in many ways, he’s like a squirrel that watches TV.”
