The president is a stand-up comedian.
“He goes out, he practices his jokes, he works on his material,” Noah told Seth Meyers on Wednesday’s Late Night, pointing to Trump floating the idea of pardoning Joe Arpaio to his rally crowd in Phoenix. “You can see him trying it out … [when] the crowd cheers, he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m working on that bit.’”
Noah says that Trump’s catchphrases go through the same kinds of life and death cycles that comedians’s do. “Build the wall!” used to be a crowd-killer, Noah says, but now Trump’s crowds want “new jokes” to latch onto and print on T-shirts. Maybe Trump’s recent deal with Democrats isn’t quite what they had in mind, but as Noah points out, it at least makes for some surprising new material.