Jon Stewart has a trusty method to not getting “overemotional” about the stuff Donald Trump says — or does he?
This week on The Daily Show, the political comic unveiled a chart featuring a Y axis with the word “OK?” and X axis with “statements over time” in order to gauge the proportionality of people’s outcries toward the GOP leader’s actions.
“Hi sharks,” he began, referencing ABC’s long-running business reality TV series Shark Tank. “When I saw the President of the United States starting out on tariffs and ending up on dolls and parades and pencils, I thought, there’s gotta be a better way to help Americans figure out which of the things it’s OK to get upset about and which things are just him f—ing off. So I invented this chart.”
Soon, however, Stewart got sidetracked by the recent deluge of news, including Trump’s announcement that he wanted to reopen the museum of Alcatraz as a prison (“Why would you want to do that?”).
Despite not wanting to “take the bait” and pinning that statement low on the chart, Stewart lost his cool, later backtracking, “The chart was supposed to prevent this kind of overemotional digression. This one’s on me. I am not leading a chart-based life right now.”
Then he addressed Trump’s artificial intelligence-generated image as a would-be pope, plotting the dot slightly higher on the chart. After playing a clip of an MSNBC anchor clarifying that Trump could not actually be the supreme pontiff, Stewart — visibly rocking from annoyance in his chair — said, “You see what you’re doing to people, Trump? MSNBC’s got to waste valuable airtime fact-checking your f—ing nonsense — time they could have spent frowning, sighing and rolling their eyes.”
When the conversation turned to POTUS’ recent Meet the Press interview, in which he responded “I don’t know” to a question regarding a president’s duty to uphold the Constitution, Stewart unveiled a fold-over from the back to reveal a sky-high dot titled “holy sh– no this is not OK,” emphasizing the point by drawing a box and frowning face around it.
And don’t even get Stewart started on the AI-generated Star Wars image, which led the host, a Lucasfilm devotee, to go on a rant about how “he’s not a f—ing Jedi in that picture” but rather a Sith Lord, given the villainous coloring on his lightsaber.
