Trevor Noah kicked off Tuesday’s episode of “The Daily Show” with a long segment about the FBI raiding the office of Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen after delivering only a few quick zingers about the incident on Monday. But it was worth the wait.
“You can tell this raid has got Trump rattled because this morning the president tweeted this,” Noah said, referring to Trump’s “Attorney-client privilege is dead!” tweet. Noah played a clip of a CNN anchor talking about the tweet and Trump’s angry response to the Cohen raid both on Monday and Tuesday, saying Trump “went to bed fuming and woke ranting,” an image that had Noah in stitches as he tried to picture it.
“Poor Trump. I imagine him in bed this morning just tears streaming down his face, like, ‘Nooooooo! mM attorney-client privilege is deeeeeeeead! “At least I’ve still got you, white privilege, don’t ever leave me. Don’t ever leave me!’” Noah exclaimed. “Look, the fact is, attorney-client privilege doesn’t apply when prosecutors have probable cause to believe that you and your lawyer were committing a crime together. It doesn’t work. So I think it’s pretty clear that Trump is probably just shouting out legal terms he’s heard on ‘Law and Order.’ Tomorrow he will be like, “OBJECTION! DOUBLE JEOPARDY, YOUR HONOR. HABEAS CORPUS!’”
Earlier in the segment, “The Daily Show” played the clip from Monday in which Trump talked about the raid during a meeting that was supposed to be about Syria, in which he described it as “an attack on all we stand for.
“That’s right, it’s an attack on what we all stand for,” Noah agreed, facetiously. “You know, the American ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of having a lawyer pay off your side chick.”
In that same clip from Monday and again on Twitter Tuesday morning, Trump called the situation, as he always does, a “witch hunt,” but Noah wasn’t so sure of that comparison because a literal witch hunt would be much easier to pull off, and the hoops required for the FBI to be able to raid a lawyer’s office are much more difficult to jump through than the very low standards of proof needed to burn a witch back in the day.
“That doesn’t sound like a witch hunt to me because witch hunts were really simple, right? Back then it was just like, ‘She shrank my penis! Burn her at the stake!’ That’s pretty much all you needed. What we’re hearing way is just too much legal procedure to be considered a witch hunt. Like if people in Salem had this kind of due process, they would have never burned anyone. No one would have died,” Noah said, before acting out a dialogue of someone who wants to burn a woman alive for being a witch facing down the relatively high standards of modern law.
Wannabe witch burner: “She shrank my penis, let’s burn her at the stake!”
Salem judge: “All right all right, but first you must fill out this official complaint.”
Wannabe witch burner: “Okay, and then we’ll burn her!”
Salem judge: “No no, wait, then we’ll have to see what the witnesses say and how big your penis originally used to be.”
Wannabe witch burner: “What was that?”
Salem judge: “We need to know how big your penis actually was.”
Wannabe witch burner: “You know what? Forget it, man, I actually made up the witch thing because Hester wouldn’t let me smash. I’m going to tell the truth.”
You can watch this portion of the opening segment from Tuesday’s “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” in the video embedded at the top of this post.