Jon Stewart on response to Minnesota shootings: ‘What are we doing?'
Late-night hosts respond to Donald Trump's underwhelming military parade, the record-breaking No Kings protests and Republican disinformation around the shooting of a Minnesota politician.
Jon Stewart arrived at his Monday evening perch on the Daily Show reeling from an eventful weekend in US news. 'Let me just say this to start off: Fuck! Just to start off,' he said. 'This weekend – terrible! Again. I'm so sorry.'
Stewart started first with Israel's military strike of nuclear facilities in Iran, a conflict Trump teased that the US military would join, after his administration deployed troops in Los Angeles to battle peaceful protests of his immigration raids.
'The only problem with their posture – that I see with it – is their reluctance to commit the American military to fighting drawn-out and often pointless wars doesn't seem to extend to America,' Stewart said of Republicans reticent to support Trump's foreign policy. 'The Maga mindset appears to be: we didn't vote for foreign wars, we voted for civil war.'
'They are looking for any pretense to stick their robot dogs on Democrats,' he said of Republicans supporting the use of military force on Los Angeles protesters, 'and the strategy that they're using is to inflate the threat that this country now faces, to so rile up their base as to make the left in this country – represented by over 75 million votes in the past presidential election – as a legitimate military target for the United States of America. It's a strategy that's been used before to gin up military conflict.'
Stewart then pivoted to the horrific shooting of Melissa Hortman, a Minnesota Democratic state representative, and her husband, Mark, in their home. The suspect, Vance Boelter, had a hit list of Democratic representatives and appears to have espoused far-right views, but Stewart wasn't interested.
'I don't give a fuck why this person did it,' he said. 'I don't care whose team he's on, I don't care if he listens to NPR or Fox News, I don't give a flying fuck. What blows my mind is our resignation in the aftermath of this nonsense,' he said, referring to a campaign of misinformation and outright apathy in the wake of political violence.
'We're willing to do things about other issues,' he continued. 'Why are they attacking Los Angeles right now? Why is the right so willing to tear our cities apart in this moment?' Stewart then played a series of clips of Republican lawmakers claiming that any violence by any immigrant demanded a firm response.
'Violence should never be accepted, it should never be tolerated – but that's for their issue,' he said. 'In the wake of Sandy Hook, and Uvalde, and Parkland, and El Paso, and Lewiston, and Aurora, and Buffalo, and Boulder, and Binghamton, and Highland Park, and Monterey Park, and San Bernardino, and San Jose, and San Francisco, and the Pulse nightclub, and the Colorado Springs nightclub, and the Little Rock nightclub, and the Borderline Bar in Thousand Oaks, and the Ned Peppers Bar in Dayton, and the Waffle House in Nashville, and Virginia Tech, and UVA, and MSU, and UCSB, and FSU, and NIU, and SMC, and the Sutherland Springs Church, and the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, and the Living Church of God, and the Tree of Life Synagogue, and the Allen Mall, and the Westroads Mall, and Fort Hood, and Lockheed Martin, and – what are we fucking doing? What are we doing? By the way, that is a wildly incomplete list. We kept it to the last 25 years, and it's still not everything.'
He continued: 'Why is it when a foreigner, or someone that shouldn't be here, kills one of us, we're gonna put $150bn into border security, we're gonna militarize our cities, we're gonna spend trillions to bomb and destabilize foreign countries overseas, we're gonna ban people from random countries from ever fucking visiting here, we're gonna take our shoes off at the airport forever – but when we do it to ourselves, nothing?'
'Is it that the only acceptable deaths are those that are made in America?' he concluded. 'Our only response now is to tally-up the psycho scoreboard on whose side the perp belongs to?'
'On Saturday, Trump had his much-anticipated stupid sweet 16, disguised as a tribute to the US Army he bone-spurred his way out of,' said Jimmy Kimmel, referring to Trump's military parade. The $50m event turned out to be 'boring' – 'it was basically the $50m version of when a five-year-old shows you every car in his Hot Wheels collection'.
The parade boasted corporate sponsors including UFC, a crypto company and Scott's Miracle-Gro, 'which is the product Trump uses on his head', Kimmel quipped. 'There were flyovers, there were combovers, the whole thing!'
'After all this talk that this wasn't a birthday party for him, it kind of seemed like a birthday party for him,' Kimmel continued before a clip of the muted crowd singing 'happy birthday' to Trump. He then cut to a shot of Trump appearing to doze off during the firework show. 'There's sleepy Don taking it all in,' he said. 'In fairness, that's as close as he gets to being able to sleep with his wife, so he took the opportunity.'
'The turnout was much lower than expected, but as Trump would say, there were record-breaking crowds,' he added. 'The bleachers, as you can see, are almost empty. The crowds were sparse.'
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert celebrated Father's Day, because 'Daddy got just what he wanted: no one came to Trump's big stupid birthday parade.'
The White House claims that 250,000 people attended, though Colbert was skeptical. 'Apparently a quarter of a million people looks like this,' he said over a photo of a sparsely populated lawn. 'They must be really good at hide and seek. Maga stands for Make America Grass Again, I guess.'
'That was so sparsely attended that these poor troops were forced to march past empty bleachers,' he added before a clip of squeaky tanks rolling by mostly empty stands. 'We may have one WWII, but this weekend we lost the battle with WD-40,' he quipped.
'It looked like no one was having a good time at this thing, not even Donald Trump,' he said before a photo of Trump scowling as he watched the procession. 'That is one sad sack of potatoes,' Colbert laughed.
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers also mocked Trump's poorly attended birthday parade, where every administration official in attendance looked bored. At one point, the camera captured Marco Rubio yawning.
'Everything about this soggy, poorly attended birthday parade just made Trump look more pathetic,' said Meyers. 'The special guests were bored out of their minds, the bleachers were emptier than a football game at Oberlin, the lawn had enough empty space for a game of ultimate frisbee.'
'But while deflated Trump was watching robot dogs walk by sparse crowds for his birthday, millions of Americans were fanning out across the country for historic nationwide protests,' he added, referring to the 5 million or so Americans who showed up for the 'No Kings' protests in rebuke of Trump's administration.
'Our system of government is in dire straits, but the massive outpouring of energy across the country was proof that Americans will not easily give up democracy,' said Meyers. 'This was, by all accounts, one of the largest protests in American history. Compare that to the president who, despite all his power and wealth, looked like a guy who was using his crappy golden phone to call roadside assistance.'
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California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next. Democracy is next,' Newsom said in a major address he framed as the president sending Marines to his state to try to provoke violent clashes. 'Democracy is under assault before our eyes. This moment we have feared has arrived.' Trump officials boasted about images coming from California, saying they were 'happy to have this fight,' and Trump gave the green light for law enforcement to take aggressive action. ' If they spit, we will hit,' he said. 'It is really tragic to be in a situation where it is the right thing to do in these situations, to basically make sure that Republicans aren't able to step in there and set a false narrative,' said Pat Dennis, president of American Bridge 21st Century, a pro-Democratic group. 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