“The Daily Show” host Jordan Klepper sheepishly accepted a round of delayed, muted applause on Tuesday night for a crude series of jokes about the Washington, D.C, Reflecting Pool, admitting to his audience afterward, “I guilted you into it.”
Klepper spent the first portion of his Tuesday monologue dryly mocking President Trump over his latest trip to Europe, which is set to include a dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron at Versailles. “Dinner at Versailles? OK, you know what? I’m gonna give Trump this one. That’s been pinned on his Pinterest board since he was 12,” Klepper joked. “A beautiful palace of gold and mirrors where nothing bad ever happens to rich people.”
“Enjoy it,” he told the president. “Enjoy your beautiful dinner at the beautiful palace, because pretty soon you have to come back to Washington, D.C., where things have taken a turn.” To prove his point, the Comedy Central host rolled a clip of the recently renovated Reflecting Pool, which has turned green with algae in recent days.
“Holy s—t, that pool is green,” Klepper observed. “Looks like there was a Grinch orgy in it. Looks like the bathtub where Kermit slit his wrists. Looks like the Statue of Liberty’s placenta in there, am I right?” The colorful jokes shocked even the “Daily Show” audience, who needed a moment of awkward silence before eventually clapping for the Statue of Liberty gag.
Pivoting back to the algae issues, Klepper said he expected Trump’s $14 million renovation of the D.C. landmark to have included some “state-of-the-art” solution to an easily predictable problem. Instead, the comedian was met with a clip of workers pouring gallons of cleaning fluids into the pool.
“Sure! Just dump in gallons of hydrogen peroxide. Just love that, guys. First thought, best thought. That’s what I always say,” Klepper remarked. “You know what? As someone who’s tried to clean a humidifier the same way, might I recommend just buying a new Reflecting Pool at Target?”
He went on to torch conservative podcaster Grant Stinchfield for speculating that the Reflecting Pool’s sudden green turn was the result of “sabotage” on the part of Trump’s political opponents.
“This is the beauty of the MAGAverse,” Klepper mused. “Donald Trump is never too corrupt or incompetent for the job if you always come up with a new layer, a bad guy, to blame the problems on. I know the deep state photosynthesis theory sounds dopey, but so did rigged elections at first — and look where that got us.”
