‘Daily Show’ Host Trevor Noah: ‘It’s Like America Elected Gollum As President’ (Video)
Trevor Noah spent a chunk of his opening segment on “The Daily Show” Tuesday night talking through Donald Trump’s continuing chatter about the opioid epidemic, which Trump talks a big game about while being either unwilling or simply unable to actually do anything meaningful about it whatsoever.
Noah started the discussion by playing a clip of Trump this week suggesting, again, that the U.S. should execute drug dealers, and then waffling on whether or not he’s able to understand why we wouldn’t be willing to take such insanely extreme measures.
“It’s possible that our country is not ready for that. And I can understand it, maybe — although, personally, I can’t understand that,” Trump said on Monday. And Noah had a great joke about Trump’s weird speech pattern when delivering those comments.
“One of my favorite things about Trump is that he has inner monologues out loud. It’s like America elected Gollum as president,” Noah said, as he launched into an impersonation of Trump/Gollum. “‘We must have the death penalty. The country is not ready. We are ready!’ I mean, at least we know that even if no one runs against Trump in 2020, the debates are still going to be great, just him and himself.”
Noah then explained the complicating factors that make giving the death penalty for dealing drugs such a bad idea.
“Look, the truth is I can see why Trump thinks killing drug dealers will solve the opioid crisis. It’s the same way he thought getting rid of Comey would make the whole Russia thing go away,” Noah said. “Today’s epidemic is complicated in many ways. Let’s say you kill all the drug dealers, the bad drug dealers, the bad man dealing drugs on the corner. In this opioid crisis, that’s hardly the only kind of person involved. See, do you also kill doctors who overprescribe painkillers? Do you kill family members who buy opioids for their addicted loved ones? Do you kill the people who sell drugs to pay for their own addiction? This is complicated.
“I’m not saying all of Trump’s plans are bad, it’s just that some of his drug-fighting ideas seem to come straight out of the ’80s. like this.”
Then “The Daily Show” played a clip of Trump espousing PSA commercials explaining to kids that drugs are bad as if that could possibly help with a drug epidemic related to prescription drugs. Noah took particular note of the end of the clip, when Trump said “we’ll make them very, very bad commercials.,” with a long pause before he said “bad.”
“Trump, he tried so hard to think of a different word. And then he just gave up. ‘Very, very… bad commercials.’ Now look, again, I see why Trump thinks that this idea makes sense. I mean, if the president of the United States believes everything he sees on TV, then why wouldn’t teenagers?”
Noah then discussed how studies have shown in the past several decades that not only have anti-drug commercials not worked, but they probably actually increased drug use among teenagers. So Noah suggested a new way to do these sorts of ads: by trying to convince kids that if they do drugs they’ll end up like Donald Trump.
“I believe that the president sincerely wants to keep young people away from drugs, which is why here at ‘The Daily Show,’ we decided to help. You see, typical anti-drug PSAs don’t work on the kids. What Trump needs is a way to make drugs seem uncool to young people, and for once, I believe he’s the right man for the job. Because according to polls, two-thirds of American teenagers think Donald Trump is totes lame. So to keep them off drugs, all the president needs to do is pretend that he takes drugs, which shouldn’t be that hard.”
You can watch Noah’s discussion of the opioid epidemic in the video above.
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