“Daily Show” host Jon Stewart was briefly stunned into silence on Monday night over an observation President Donald Trump made after meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping last week.
“If you went to Hollywood and you looked for a leader of China, you couldn’t find a guy like him,” Trump said. “He’s tall, very tall. Especially for this country, ’cause they tend to be a little bit shorter.”
It took Stewart 15 seconds to respond.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he finally asked.
Stewart said it might be “as good as we can expect” from Trump, given his history, and wondered if the president was ready to comment on the Chinese leader’s eyes while he was at it.
“You might be watching this and wondering: How the fuck is this guy our president?!?” Stewart asked. “How? How is this possible? He should not have this job. And yet… he does.”
But as Stewart pointed out, there’s another way to deal with this situation.
“Maybe it’s time to stop being exasperated by this, by Trump,” he said. “And maybe it’s time to see if we can glean lessons from Trump’s rise.”
And with that, he turned Trump’s career trajectory into mock lessons for recent college grads who are looking for a job. Honesty and hard work are out the window. Instead, Stewart sarcastically noted, grads could follow the president’s lead and be “cocky and super fucking weird” as they lie during job interviews and even insult their questioners.
“I don’t know why this works. I don’t fucking get it. I don’t,” he said. “But here we are – and here he is. And he’s the president, and I’m on basic cable. I don’t understand!”
Check out the full segment below: