{"id":889518,"date":"2026-09-09T18:24:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T18:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/889518\/"},"modified":"2026-09-09T18:24:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T18:24:09","slug":"jon-stewart-on-donald-trumps-hectic-summer-relentless-denial-of-reality-late-night-tv-roundup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/889518\/","title":{"rendered":"Jon Stewart on Donald Trump\u2019s hectic summer: \u2018Relentless denial of reality\u2019 | Late-night TV roundup"},"content":{"rendered":"

Late-night hosts returned from summer vacation to a nation still in crisis, from the war in Iran to gas prices to Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s meme war to rename<\/a> Lake Ontario.<\/p>\n

Jon Stewart<\/p>\n

After a month away, Jon Stewart<\/a> returned to The Daily Show on Tuesday evening with a quick recap of Donald Trump\u2019s low-key actions in the should-be slow month of August: rolling back childhood vaccine requirements, attacking mail-in voting, threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center and suggesting he would bomb American allies such as Oman, as well as all of Iran.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cGod, it never ends with this dude Trump,\u201d Stewart lamented. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen one person work so much and fix so little. It\u2019s exhausting in a way that\u2019s difficult to articulate,\u201d which is why one of the stories from August stuck with Stewart.<\/p>\n

That would be the plight of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the huge aircraft carrier carrying more than 5,000 US sailors and marines, which recently docked in Thailand, rusted and corroded by the elements, after 286 days at sea.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is what we look like as Americans inside after 18 months of this presidency,\u201d Stewart joked next to a photo of the run-down ship. \u201cI want you to think about the visible, tangible, actual, indisputable, factual signs of corrosion on this ship.\u201d Trump, meanwhile, claimed the ship was \u201cbeautifully maintained and beautifully taken care of\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not!\u201d Stewart exclaimed. \u201cThe actual Abraham Lincoln is in better shape than this ship! A \u2018beautifully maintained, beautifully taken care of\u2019 ship doesn\u2019t look like the abandoned bridge near my high school where we used to smoke weed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s this, the relentless denial of reality that is one of the elements eating away at the foundational load-bearing structures that hold this country together,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

The other corrosive element? The memes. \u201cPlease make it stop,\u201d a deeply fatigued Stewart pleaded before playing the clip, posted to official government accounts, of Trump crossing out the name \u201cLake Ontario\u201d and writing \u201cLake America\u201d in Sharpie amid escalating trade tensions with Canada. \u201cYou can\u2019t! That\u2019s not how things work!\u201d Stewart shouted. \u201cYou don\u2019t settle complicated international agreements by writing just a new name on the map and expecting everyone to just follow along.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy are we trolling them?\u201d he wondered of the Trump administration\u2019s needling of Canada. \u201cIs that the plan? To troll them into submission?\u201d<\/p>\n

Later in the segment, Stewart explored one of the factors contributing to Trump\u2019s seemingly infinite levels of delusion. \u201cDonald Trump has an aide whose whole job is to reinforce his warped reality,\u201d he explained before a news clip about the White House aide Natalie Harp sending Trump \u201clove letters\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is unbelievable,\u201d Stewart continued. \u201cThe outside world is somehow fed into this woman \u2013 a single conduit. And from there, she is the filter to all the information that is directly fed into Donald Trump\u2019s psyche.\u201d Stewart then played a doctored version of the viral trailer<\/a> for Nathan Fielder\u2019s upcoming documentary on the disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes with Trump\u2019s face superimposed on to Fielder\u2019s body, while the convicted fraudster asks: \u201cWhy would I deceive you? There\u2019s no reason for me to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jimmy Kimmel<\/p>\n

And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel<\/a> returned after his standard summer holiday for his 4,000th show since it premiered in February 2003. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot of shows,\u201d he acknowledged. \u201cAccording to the White House, it\u2019s too many shows.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kimmel also took a moment to shout out the haters: \u201cThere are those who said we wouldn\u2019t last this long. There are even those who use the regulatory might of the FCC to unconstitutionally try to make sure we didn\u2019t last this long. But we did it the hard way, Brendan\u201d \u2013 that would be Brendan Carr, Trump\u2019s head of the FCC \u2013 \u201cand we are still here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kimmel then briefly recapped where he had left the country when he last addressed his audience in June \u2013 algae-infested Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, war with Iran, high gas prices, inflation, Mitch McConnell either alive or dead \u201cand nobody seemed to have any idea which. No one still seems to. I guess they don\u2019t even care any more? Because they seem to have stopped trying to find out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Three months later, not much had changed. \u201cAre you telling me the president of the United States had three full months and spent $20m and couldn\u2019t even get a pool cleaned?\u201d Kimmel quipped. \u201cHow are we supposed to win the war in Iran if we can\u2019t even win the war against algae?\u201d<\/p>\n

More recently, Trump \u201cpumped out a gusher of AI-generated slop\u201d in a way \u201cthat almost felt like he was welcoming me back to work\u201d. This Sunday alone, Trump posted 37 times on Truth Social, including a video of himself renaming the state of New Mexico \u201cNew America\u201d. (The federal government, for what it\u2019s worth, has no authority to do that.) \u201cListen, if there was a new America, we\u2019d all go there immediately,\u201d Kimmel joked.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs if the people in New Mexico don\u2019t already have enough on their plate, trying to spell the word \u2018Albuquerque\u2019. Now they have to deal with this.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Late-night hosts returned from summer vacation to a nation still in crisis, from the war in Iran to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":889519,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75],"class_list":["post-889518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=889518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/889519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=889518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=889518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=889518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}