On Tuesday night, The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah took a break from clowning on first lady Melania Trump’s hatred of the White House Christmas to address the more serious news wafting from its walls: President Trump’s made-for-TV return to the White House, even though he is still battling the novel coronavirus (and surely contagious).
Trump made a big show of his premature return from Walter Reed Medical Center—where he’d spent three days recuperating on supplemental oxygen, an experimental cocktail of antibodies, steroids, and various other treatments—standing proudly on the balcony of the White House and ripping off his mask for all to see.
“Goddamn! The dude ripped his mask off the second he got home,” offered Noah. “And I know Trump thinks this is a triumphant moment, but he’s presumably still riddled with COVID and he’s about to walk indoors and expose it to everyone inside? Yo, this wasn’t a photo op—it was a biological attack on the White House!”
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Indeed, Trump stood in close proximity to staffers without a mask for his balcony photo op, which was also filmed not once, but twice for a strongman propaganda video.
“I mean, there was a photographer standing right next to him,” explained Noah. “That dude is basically the world’s unluckiest Instagram boyfriend. I honestly can’t believe this. This is Trump putting his own staff at risk. You would think he would be a lot more careful about protecting his own staff. This is coronavirus, not a prison sentence—you can’t just pardon them afterwards.”
Trump has not only put even more of his staff at risk—after the medical staff of Walter Reed and the Secret Service, who had to accompany Trump for portions of his hospital joyride the other day—but now his team, and by extension those at Fox News, are trying to paint the president as some sort of brave hero for contracting a deadly virus that he’d downplayed and refused to protect himself against for months, despite it claiming over 210,000 American lives.
“Team Trump wants to go even further. They’re trying to convince you that Trump getting coronavirus is why you should vote for him,” explained Noah.
There was Rudy Giuliani, who coughed through a Fox News interview where he compared Trump to “a general” who was “leading America;” Fox News host Jesse Waters, who is a racist, said the same, saying, “This is like when the general gets wounded by the invisible enemy, gets patched up, and then gets right back to the front line;’ and the Trump campaign’s communications director, Erin Perrine, boasted of how Trump “has experience now of fighting the coronavirus” which “Joe Biden doesn’t have.”
“Really Joe Biden doesn’t have the experience of being infected with corona?” asked Noah. “Man, you almost gotta appreciate the balls of the Trump campaign. Who else would come out and say, ‘Look, do we really want to vote for someone who understands how masks work?’ I mean, by that logic, Trump can’t understand any issue unless he gets his ass kicked by it first.”
He added, “Look, man: There’s nothing noble about getting corona because you refused to be safe.”
