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Louise Thomas
Editor
Jon Stewart has looked back on “a terrible f***ing week” for America in the wake of the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump.
The comedian, 61, had to cancel plans to broadcast The Daily Show from Milwaukee in Wisconsin, where the Republican National Convention is currently taking place, and instead greeted viewers from the show’s usual New York City studio.
Tuesday night’s episode saw Stewart address the shooting, which took place during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend and left Trump largely unscathed, with a bullet grazing his ear. One spectator was killed and two others were rushed to hospital, though their conditions have since stabilised.
“We dodged a catastrophe, but it was still a tragedy,” the late night host said, before paying tribute to former fire chief Corey Comperatore, who died after protecting his family from bullets.
Stewart also joked about the conspiracy theories that sprung up online in the wake of the incident, ironically suggesting that “the internet is a great source of information” when “s*** hits the fan”.
“For instance, within minutes, I found out that this [attack] is staged, and then I found out that it was actually an inside job, and then I found out it was Joe Biden who ordered it,” he said.
Stewart, who presented The Daily Show from 1999 to 2015, also mocked his decision to return to the programme to cover the 2024 presidential race.
“Hey Jon, come back to The Daily Show just for the election, it’ll be fun,” he joked. “You can do one day a week, it’ll be a laugh. What could go wrong?”
He went on to address the change of venue, explaining to viewers that
“because of the attempt on the former president’s life, the venue in which we planned to do the show, which was originally located in the soft perimeter, was shifted, understandably so, to the hard perimeter”.
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“You really don’t want to be in the hard perimeter,” he continued. “It was locked down. They build cages around the theatre, and because of that, we felt that we could not put on the theatre shows effectively without people.”
A statement posted on The Daily Show’s Twitter/X account had previously cited “logistical issues and the evolving situation in Milwaukee” as the reasons for the cancellation.
