‘Do You See the Metaphor?’ Jon Stewart Points to Rusting USS Abraham Lincoln While Sounding Alarm on Trump’s ‘Denial of Reality’

Jon Stewart said he picked a hell of a month to take a break as The Daily Show host returned to survey an August in which he warned that President Donald Trump’s “relentless denial of reality” was spinning at a furious clip.

Stewart opened his first monologue back by wondering whether he had missed much during his absence, before rolling a rapid-fire cable news montage of Trump’s actions over the past month, including moves to roll back childhood vaccine requirements, push to reinvent the Kennedy Center and fresh attacks on mail-in voting.

“God, it never ends with this dude Trump,” Stewart said after watching the reel. “I’ve never seen one person work so much and fix so little. It’s exhausting.”

The host then zeroed in on the one story he said “did resonate” with him “much more deeply” – the situation aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which docked in Thailand after a record 286-day deployment at sea as part of the president’s Iran war.

Flashing images of the ship before and after the deployment, during which it went from painted and clean to rusted, Stewart asked his audience: “Do you see the metaphor?”

“This ship,” he continued, “a symbol of American might, ingenuity, technical know-how, patriotic determination, laid low by prolonged exposure to relentless, corrosive elements – reckless mismanagement – this ship, do you see?”

“It’s not the USS Lincoln, he warned. “It’s not. It’s just us. It’s us. We’re the ship. This is what we look like as Americans inside after 18 months of this presidency.”

“And by the way, we don’t get the one-week Thai sex trip to try and paper it all over — we just have to suck it up,” he jibed.

Rounding on the president, he rolled back a clip of Trump insisting the ship was “beautifully maintained and beautifully taken care of.”

“The actual Abraham Lincoln is in better shape than this ship!” Stewart interjected.

This, the host said, was part of Trump’s “relentless denial of reality,” which he argued is among the forces “eating away at the foundational load-bearing structures that hold this country together.”

As proof, he then pointed to Trump’s meme attacks as part of his “full-blown trade war with Canada,” which the host warned had “real consequences” for real American workers.

Stewart also ripped Trump’s trolling decision to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America and his AI-generated cartoons of him flooring Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in an ice hockey game.

“That’s not how things work! You don’t settle complicated international agreements by writing just a new name on the map and expecting everyone to just follow along,” Stewart exclaimed, before jabbing at Google and Apple for renaming the lake on their map apps.

The comedian later turned his attention to those who he argued feed Trump’s distorted view of reality, namely aide Natalie Harp, who became the subject of scrutiny herself in August while Stewart was on vacation.

“Donald Trump has an aide whose whole job is to reinforce his warped reality,” Stewart said before airing a news report describing Harp’s role as presenting him with positive stories about himself and her sending the president “love letters.”

“This is unbelievable,” he continued. “The outside world is somehow fed into this woman – a single conduit. And from there, she is the filter to all the information that is directly fed into Donald Trump’s psyche.”

Stewart capped the segment with a spoof of Nathan Fielder’s viral documentary teaser that dropped this week, which featured a bizarre interaction between Fielder and incarcerated Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

Seizing the clip from the You Can See Everything trailer, Stewart superimposed Trump’s face onto the comedian’s body as footage of Holmes played, as the host compared her to Harp.

“Why would I deceive you?” Holmes asked Trump in the clip. “There’s no reason for me to do that.”

Watch above via Comedy Central.

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