“The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart tore up his own papers Monday night watching President Donald Trump‘s “on the nose” excuses for capturing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
Recapping the U.S. military’s capture of Maduro, Stewart joked that the illegitimate Venezuelan president was “reverse ICE’d,” explaining, “He was actually imported to a jail in Brooklyn.” While the ethics of the military operation to arrest Maduro remain a heated point of debate, Stewart looked ahead and predicted how the decision may be seen a few decades from now.
“Based on the United States’ track record, my guess is we’re going to be really happy about this for a couple of weeks, and then 30 years from now, there will be a Venezuelan leftist revolution and the new government will point to this moment as the reason our embassy there is on fire,” Stewart said. “And it will absolutely ruin a Democrat’s presidency. Generally, that’s how this s—t works.”
Trump has used Venezuela’s oil reserves as a partial defense of his interventionist move, telling reporters, “We’re going to get the oil flowing the way it should be.” In response, Stewart observed, “Seems a little… on the nose. Um. Oil, [a] precious commodity, certainly, but not the reason a country, formed 250 years ago on the ideas of liberty and self-determination, would go into a country and snatch a man at night? There must be a slightly more noble pretense.”
When “The Daily Show” then rolled clips of Trump doubling down on his open interest in Venezuela’s oil, Stewart incredulously asked, “Is this your first war!?” You can watch the full “Daily Show” segment yourself in the video below.
An increasingly desperate Stewart hoped that South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, an “old hand at war-mongering,” would be able to help reframe America’s presence in Venezuela. “You’ve done this a bunch,” Stewart pleaded with Graham. “Can you help this dude out with a casus belli and keep Trump from bringing it back to oil?”
“The Daily Show” played a clip of Graham trying to do just that, only for Trump to interrupt and boast about the opportunity that Maduro’s removal from power has given oil companies. “Godd—n it! What?!?” Stewart exclaimed in response, while tearing his own papers in half. “We can’t even be conspiracy theorists now! ‘I think they did it for the oil.’ ‘Yeah, no, I did it for the oil.’”
“These motherf—kers are going full conquistador in front of our eyes!” Stewart later observed. Following a clip of Trump expressing his interest in other foreign countries and territories, including Greenland and Colombia, Stewart then lamented the current state of America’s foreign policy under Trump.
“Let the word go forth to a new generation of Americans that if we need s—t and it’s not too far away, we are going to take it,” the “Daily Show” host declared. He then asked Trump directly, “Anything else you want to take over? I think there’s still some time to go after Warner Bros. Discovery! I mean, America doesn’t have Netflix money, but we will after we get that sweet oil.”
