Trump Sends Troops to Portland & Shootings Trigger Left-Right Blame Game | The Daily Show

Welcome to The Daily Show. My name is Jon Stewart. We have a fabulous show for you tonight. Historian and professor Jill Lepore will be here later. She's going to be discussing her latest book to discuss the Constitution of the United States or what remains of it.

Boy, we should have laminated that thing, huh? Because, well, as many of you know out there, we had another just blessed weekend in America of chaos and carnage. There were six mass shootings in 24 hours, two in North Carolina, two in Louisiana, one in Texas.

The terrible scenes out of Michigan. But fear not, because the president is on the case.

This morning, President Trump declares he's deploying troops to Portland, Oregon.

Oh! Portland!

You just missed it! You're gonna want a little to the... You're gonna... You... You've got the right country. But you're gonna want to shift the resour...

Why Portland? Trump posting, I'm sorry. But you're gonna want to shift the resort...

Why Portland? Trump posting, I'm directing Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to provide all necessary troops to protect war-ravaged Portland.

Hey, stop it! No, no, no! Uncontrollable, these people. And the orgy of mass shootings in America. Portland? Did I miss Vancouver attacking Portland in a fierce battle of mellow artisans?

Don't shoot till you see the whites of their cold foam half-caff latte art. Not sure what that accent was. Here's the craziest part. The people of Oregon, Portland in particular, were also caught off guard by this. And the governor of Oregon tried to explain to the president that they were not in a state of war.

And the president's response was, well, it was telling.

President Trump, in an interview with NBC on Sunday morning, said a phone call with Governor Kotech showed him a different perspective.

Saying, I spoke to the governor, she was very nice, but I said, well, wait a minute,

am I watching watching on television. But if it's Game of Thrones, I'd say yes. Conditions in Portland may vary. And B, this explains so much about the governing philosophy of the Trump administration. There is reality, and then there's this.

My people tell me different. They are literally attacking,

and there are fires all over the place.

And dragons. There be dragons! So, the President of the United States, alone in his bescreened bunker, sees reports of conflict in Portland on TV. His lackeys reinforce the chaos. And rather than take a breath, rather than take a beat,

rather than not acting rashly, rather than using the resources available to him as the president of the United States to find out what the realities on the ground are, he just goes, Code red! Red team, go!

Because he sees it on f-ing TV and acts impulsively. He sends out the National Guard the same way you or I might make a late-night shamwow purchase. I saw it on TV!

It looked... It was on TV!

In reality, it's just a f***ing rag. But at 3 in the morning...

It's magic!

Meanwhile, the non-Portland area of the country is going through some shit. As we mentioned, there's a mass shooting now like every couple of hours. Previously, the routine would be we express our shock, we express our sadness, we offer our thoughts and prayers, we spend a day, maybe two, arguing about the appropriateness of bringing up guns at all, and then we do nothing until the next time.

But as our politics becomes more polarized, even that learned cycle of helplessness has been replaced by a new post-shooting pastime. That new pastime is, was this one of yours?

The shooter was a radical leftist.

The guy is a right-wing,

Trump-supporting,

evangelical Christian.

He is a Biden supporter. Case closed.

We know the suspected shooter is Meg.

The shooter, a leftist, whack job.

It's America's new gender-reveal tradition! Boom! It's blue! Ha-ha! I'm so happy to blame the left for the violence. The game is so ubiquitous. Now we often play it before we even know who the perpetrator is.

The killer's identity may be unknown, but his point of view seems pretty clear. That's why I'm calling it political and from the left.

That's Kudlow's lock of the week! Lock it up! Next, murder rate in Chicago next weekend. Well, it's getting cold there, so I'm taking the under. By the way, playing was this one of yours is also certainly a speculative endeavor. So we are treated in the aftermath

of these horrific crimes to the news media's active politicized scavenger hunt. Which piece of inconclusive arcana proves which half of the country is to blame? The shooter reportedly voted in the 2020 Democrat

primary. The Butler Pennsylvania shooter was a registered Republican. The suspect

wasn't registered with either party. He grew up in an area of Utah that is mostly

Republican. The shooter was a registered Republican, while election records show that in 2021,

he gave $15 to a Democratic-aligned organization.

-♪♪

He's a Republican, but cheap?

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Republican, but donated to a Democrat? Maybe he just wanted the PBS Ken Burns tote bag.

I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know who to hate. Sometimes the clues aren't even expressly political, but live politically adjacent in the culture.

Social media photos show Mr. Robinson

shooting and posing with guns. There's his pickup truck, the huge American flags.

This person was a gay man who was in a relationship with another man who believed he was a woman and they were both into a phenomenon that can

only be described as as furriness.

I love that this dude has to pretend like he doesn't know what furries are. I mean, I don't know. It can only be described as a sexual costume party with animals. I mean, if you were even to do something like that, how would you even get the stains out of the costumes? I mean, especially if they had set for three days, what would you use? Club soda? Lemon? I'm just asking. Or do you just throw the costume out after each experience?

Now call me old-fashioned, but I miss the good old days of mass shootings, when networks took a principled stance to not shower attention on acts designed to get attention.

We will not say the gunman's name or show his photograph.

Fox News will not show you his picture or give him any attention by repeating his name.

We don't like naming the gunman because so often they do things just to get attention.

We don't want to bring more undue attention that is absolutely necessary

to the cowards that bring out out carry out these types of attacks.

That's right boys and girls you know when I was a boy there was a brief period in American media where not only wouldn't they say the suspected killers name they wouldn't constantly show the suspected killers only fans hot shots. They wouldn't do it. They wouldn't. Oh, dear Lord. Oh! Oh, my God.

Mmm.

He could have so he could have done so much good with those. And yet he chose the dark side.

Oh.

So why has the news media become obsessed with right-left framing of violence? Well, part of the reason is they are following the lead of social media. Social media is doing it crazier and faster than anybody else. So the media is trying to keep up. The fire in the church in Michigan was still burning when online influencers were inferring that the number of Muslims in Michigan

are what obviously made this attack happen. Until police released the suspect's photo, which looked like it came from a Duck Dynasty fanfic account. And then the left got to celebrate. And then they found a Trump-Vance sign on his house, case closed, except that sign was

placed near a stop sign. So some on the right said, no, no, no, he's saying stop Trump-Vance. Like it's some leftist rebus that he was creating. But here's the thing.

Who the f**k cares?

These mass shootings don't fit. Who honestly cares? These mass shootings do not fit neatly into our left-right paradigm. Mass shootings are probably caused by a complex fusion of mental health and access to weapons and attention-seeking delusional nihilism married to an algorithmic underworld that

set these horrific acts in motion. But unfortunately, right-left paradigm is the only way our narcissistic media ecosystem sees anything anymore. That's the system they built, so it must fit into the right-left paradigm, because that binary is the foundation of all of their programming.

So that helps them pretend that the solution to this violence is a simple change in our right-left rhetoric.

The violent rhetoric that is coming from the extreme right wing.

Democratic Party, they are not just tolerating political violence. They are cultivating it.

The right wing has gotten so incensed, so dangerously violent, at least in its rhetoric.

What is your message to your fellow Democrats in Congress?

Stop with the rhetoric, you're getting people killed.

I don't think the rhetoric is getting people killed, honestly. I don't think any of these psychotic motherf**** that are doing this are watching MSNBC. I mean, I'm only judging from the ratings. I'm almost positive they're not watching it. To suggest that we don't need to tackle any complex, deep-rooted issues haunting American society,

we just need to stop saying a few choice bad words and all our mentally broken young men will be fine? It's not realistic. And I'm pretty sure that these people

don't believe that either. When you equate federal agents with literal Nazis, you're no longer offering an opinion.

You are giving permission to escalate.

Mm, permission to escalate, right. So dangerous.

So...

This is what Hitler did with the SS. This is what Nazi Joseph Goebbels said about the Hitler youth. Nazi tactics are progressive tactics first.

Permission to escalate... granted.

Look, in America, we disagree. That's fine. That's the democratic process.

But your political opponents are not Nazis.

Except when.

The Democrats, they are authoritarians. They are jackbooted thugs.

No, no, he's not calling them Nazis. Sure, that's just a fashion critique. Jack-booted thugs, I mean those boots, and white pants in October? Are you mad? Only Hitler would pull something like that. Look, getting our arms around why this is happening is maddening and scary.

But the media's ability to memory hole mass shootings that they can't neatly fit into right left is almost as maddening as not really knowing why these killings are really happening.

Even when the suspected killers leave supposedly explicit cues on their bullets. One inscription read, uh, hey, fascist, catch, uh, giving some indication about the mindset of, uh, of Tyler Robinson.

Oh, right, no, it's very clearly anti-fascist. Very clear. Unless was there anything written

on the other bullets?

If you read this, you are gay. L-M-A-O. Okay, that seems kind of homophobic to me.

If you read this, you're gay. I don't know what that means.

Well, read it again. It means... Yeah, it's gotta mean something.

New York City college meme and digital culture researcher we spoke to said could refer to a video game called Helldivers 2. The same for other inscriptions found on an up arrow, right arrow, and three down arrows, which is how you drop a bomb in that game.

What the f*** are we even... The world that these kids now live in is so cynical and impermeable. This online netherworld. If only there were a man. One man. A man who looks square,

but is hep to what these kids are laying down, man.

There's a lot of talk about the chat platform Discord, and Kurt the Cyberguy joins us now to tell us what Discord is.

Oh! Oh! Oh!

Kurt the Cyberguy has shown up, fresh off of doing the weather in Sarasota. Thanks for the lowdown, Kurt the Cyber Guy, you old cyber dog. Say hello to your partner in crime, meme maven Gary. Meanwhile, why are we all just taking the bait from these psychos?

Authorities have not released the motive, but of course, here's the ammunition. The words anti-ice, that phrase hyphenated, written on one of the bullet casings.

We just had the facts laid out for us. This was an individual motivated by anti-ice. He wrote it on a bullet. We saw the bullet yesterday. Anti-ice. Case closed! He by anti-ice. He wrote it on a bullet. We saw the bullet yesterday. Anti-ice.

Case closed!

He wrote anti-ice. Doesn't anybody think it's f**king weird that these people just started writing on bullets all of a sudden? Like, that's the most effective way to get out their deeply held political beliefs?

Anti-ice. Nuff said.

Or is there the slightest possibility deeply held political beliefs? Anti-ICE, enough said.

Or is there the slightest possibility that these people are f*****g with us?

According to his friends, the alleged gunman was not overly political and was mainly interested in video games and Internet culture.

Clearly, it's anti-ICE, right? And his friends say, I wouldn't interpret it that way. He was never a sincere guy. Everything he said was laced with irony and sarcasm.

What kind of f*****g psychotic Internet culture? What's happening? Can't we just go back to the cinnamon challenge? Is that so hard? What is wrong with you people? Look, we would definitely have a healthier political discourse

if we weren't constantly calling each other fascists and communists and Nazis. But we are the only place in the world where this shit happens all the time. But we're not the only place in the world that name calls. So what is this? Perhaps we need to look back at our founders,

who through their infinite wisdom, designed and operated a more mature system, with checks and balances and a respect for all, that prevented this kind of corrosive infighting and radicalization.

John Quincy Adams taking aim at Jackson, asserting that Jackson didn't know how to spell, was too uneducated to become president, while newspapers portrayed his wife, Rachel, while newspapers portrayed his wife, Rachel, as a short, fat dumpling.