On Monday’s The Daily Show, Jon Stewart took aim at recent rumors that President Donald Trump had died.
“Now, normally, as many of you may know who’ve been on this planet for a few rotations, August is considered a relatively quiet month for political doings. But as we have been told many, many times, this ain’t normal,” said Stewart, fresh off a month-long vacation. “So I’m going to try and catch you up since we’ve been gone: The economy hit a brick wall, stalling on jobs, while inflation continued to rise. So Trump met with Putin in Alaska to force Ukraine to accept Crackle Barrel’s new logo, while Labubu released a new Epstein file. And Taylor got engaged. It’s a blur.”
“But all of it takes a backseat to continuing concerns over the president’s health,” he continued. “We haven’t really seen much of the president over the last week. Basically absent from the public eye. He’s clearly hiding something about his health. The hashtag ‘Trump is dead’ trended on social media.”
Chastising reporters for having “no chill,” Stewart offered suggestions for why the president might have been out of touch.
“Guy can’t take a few days for some R and R and a non-surgical breast reduction without everybody suddenly pulling out the toe tags on the president,” he said. “It does say something about the ubiquity of Donald Trump in our lives that we don’t hear from him for 20 minutes, and we’re like, ‘He’s dead. I think he’s — check, can we track him?’ It’s: ‘Well, how do you know he’s dead?’ ‘Well, it’s been seven minutes since the word ‘newsscum’ has come up on my feed. He must be dead.'”
“Trump is alive,” The Daily Show host reassured his audience. “Although I definitely would not go so far as to say alive and kicking; something is up with his health.”
Playing news reports about Trump’s diagnosis of chronic venous insufficiency (CVI) — a condition in which “the valves in your veins (usually in the leg or sometimes the arms) don’t work, causing blood to pool in your legs and putting increased pressure on the walls of the veins,” according to the Society for Vascular Surgery — Stewart discussed Trump’s “cankles” (when the calf and the ankle are equal in width) and various other “neon signs of a body under pressure,” as one British broadcaster put it.
“The whole meat bag seems to be having some kind of drainage issue,” Stewart said, introducing news reports of alarming bruising on Trump’s hand and the attempt to cover the marred flesh with makeup. “It’s not like you can treat leprosy at Sephora.”
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“May I remind you,” he continued, “these are just the parts poking out that we can see. I bet everything on that body not covered by clothes is all f—ed up right now. For all we know, the guy’s gone full Grimace: blotchy hands, puffy ankles.”
Given all of the president’s apparent ailments, Stewart pointed out that people in the president’s inner circle sound like they’re saying goodbye: “Once you begin to notice this pattern, you begin to see really the whole vibe around this president is very Make-A-Wish kid. Everyone who shows up to his office tries to make one of his dreams come true.”
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The show played clips of one visitor offering Trump a U.S. Marshal service badge, another allowing him to touch the FIFA World Cup trophy — “those who win can touch it because it’s for winners only” — others suggesting he should receive a Nobel Prize or, as Stewart suggests, a “Nobel Prize variety pack” (for economics, chemistry, and monogamy).
The ultimate gift comes via the Supreme Court: “to nullify the Fourth Amendment” — “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” per the Constitution of the United States — by allowing ICE to search and seize entire human beings based solely on their race.
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“I’m beginning to think Trump isn’t a benign suffering child at all,” Stewart said. “I’m beginning to think everybody treats Trump like this, not because he’s the Make-A-Wish kid, but because he’s that Twilight Zone kid that anytime somebody made him mad, he sent them out to the cornfield.”
“For your consideration, a nation held hostage by the fragile ego of a man-baby president, who may or may not be dying of hand syphilis, but is puffy — I don’t know if he’s dying, [but] he’s weirdly puffy — and who we’re trapped with for at least three more years — in the Twilight Zone.”
