The Daily Show: A Former President & A Trump Rally

By Alex Lumley
alex.lumley1011@gmail.com

This week saw the Daily Show tackle topics that aren't directly tied to the presidential election, primarily coverage of ongoing police brutality incidents and the explosion in Chelsea, NY. Of course, topics as important as this are discussed in great detail by all candidates hoping to run the country. But that being said, the Daily Show's coverage of topics like these this week wasn't really tied back to Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump as much as it has been in the past. Nevertheless, both candidates still received a substantial amount of coverage this week, with Hillary's moment coming at the end of last week and Trump talk having happened more recently.

Last Thursday night, the Daily Show welcomed one of their most high-profile guests of the year, and maybe in the program's history: former U.S. President Bill Clinton. Trevor Noah sat down with Clinton for a nearly 30-minute interview. Only a few minutes of the interview ended up airing as part of the television episode, but the extended interview available on the show's website allows viewers to get quite a bit of information out of the former president. Clinton discusses a number of controversies he and his wife have found themselves in throughout the course of her campaign, including his apparent chance encounter with Loretta Lynch just before the verdict on the FBI's investigation of Hillary's e-mails was released, financial concerns with the Clinton Foundation, and his wife's recent comment about the more actively homophobic, racist, and xenophobic of Trump's supporters constituting a "basket of deplorables."

Noah also prompted a response from Clinton about his thoughts on media coverage of his wife compared to that of Donald Trump. The former president spoke about why those who tend to support Trump should actually be supporting his wife, and her plans for bringing people together and what she's done in the past that proves she's the most qualified candidate to lead the country going forward. Noah ended the unusually (albeit fittingly) serious interview with a balloon drop, a comedic reference to a lighthearted moment after Hillary's DNC speech in which he seemed alight like a child at the balloons dropping there.

Former President Bill Clinton is overjoyed to interact with balloons alongside host Trevor Noah on the Daily Show.

Meanwhile, in Trump news, the business mogul's son Donald Trump Jr. released an image on social media that compared Syrian refugees to Skittles. The image asked if they knew that three skittles in a bowl of dozens would kill them, would they take the chance and eat from the bowl anyway? It then argued that Syrian refugees were the same, warning that allowing any in the country whatsoever would be foolish and dangerous.

Noah took this argument to ask by dismantling it mathematically, insinuating you're actually more likely to die from choking on Skittles than you are to be murdered by a Syrian refugee. Noah shows that if we are to maintain the Skittle analogy, the odds of being murdered by a refugee in terms of how many skittles that would represent in a bowl would require a bowl twenty times larger and wider than Donald Trump Jr. himself, with the odds being around 1 in 11 billion.

In the same clip, Noah goes on to bash Donald Trump's lies and hypocrisies, and makes an interesting point in that the American people seem often to be distracted with nonsense (such as this Skittles analogy) right when major news breaks about a lie Trump is telling or some other form of Trump failure comes out. He argues that people should be more concerned with Trump using charity money to settle legal disputes, or Trump University scamming people out of their money. Frustratingly, he says, these issues will go unreported while things like the Skittle controversy remain in the public's eye.

In further ridicule of Trump's campaign and his supporters, the Daily Show dispatched correspondent Jordan Klepper to rallys in the crucial swing states of Ohio and Wisconsin, this time to talk about conspiracy theories held by his more die-hard supporters. Klepper found that these supporters had quite a few misconceptions surrounding factual information about both Hillary Clinton and our current commander-in-chief Barack Obama. Humorously (and really quite scarily), one Trump supporter even went so far as to express outrage that President Obama was "out of the office" during the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, despite the fact that Obama wouldn't sit in the Oval Office for another 8 years.