Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders caught flak this week after she justified revoking CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials with a video experts say was altered to make Acosta look bad. But on Thursday’s episode of “The Daily Show,” Trevor Noah said her mistake was not going far enough.
“Yeah, the fact that Trump is now using doctored footage to prove something that everyone knows is a lie is deeply disturbing, but also, it’s just lazy,” Noah said. “If you’re gonna use a fake video, use a fake video. They should go all the way.”
Noah then cued up a version of the clip, but with the audio overdubbed like old martial arts movies. The clip then switches to actual footage from old martial arts films, but with Acosta’s and the intern’s heads pasted onto the bodies of the fighters. Watch the clip above.
At a press conference Wednesday, a White House intern attempted to take a microphone out of Acosta’s hand while he was asking Donald Trump a question. Afterward, the White House accused Acosta of laying hands on the intern and revoked his credentials. Media rights advocates strongly condemned the move, so Huckabee Sanders later shared video in an attempt to justify it.
The clip, edited from footage originally filmed live by NBC, is sped up and uses repeated frames to make it look like Acosta chopped the intern’s arm, multiple experts told the Washington Post. In the unaltered video, Acosta can clearly be seen evading the intern; he also says “pardon me, ma’am,” words edited out of the video shared by Sanders.
Speaking to White House pool reporters on Thursday, Sanders defended her tweet. “The question is: Did the reporter make contact or not?” she said. “The video is clear, he did. We stand by our statement.”
But Reuters reporter Jeff Mason — who was seated next to Acosta at Wednesday’s press conference — said he “did not witness him ‘placing his hands’ on the young intern, as the White House alleges. He held on to the microphone as she reached for it.”