Jordan Klepper on covering Trump rallies for The Daily Show in 2016 vs. 2020: "It’s more of a wake now, I think, is what these rallies have turned into"

The Daily Beast

"I compare it to going to see the Spin Doctors for the first time," Klepper says on The Last Laugh podcast. "And you might've loved the Spin Doctors when they came out and got their album and seeing them perform live was quite the experience. And you might be a Spin Doctors fan for the rest of your life. But four years later, playing the same songs, they don’t have any new hits to sing. And so you’re grinning through more clenched teeth. I don’t want to downplay the excitement at those rallies, but it’s not fresh anymore." As for the praise he receives for trolling Trump supporters, Klepper says: “I do think in some ways I’m providing an avatar for a lot of frustrated people who want to have these conversations and want to retort things that they think are insanity and call out contradiction and call out hyperbole. And it does feel like sometimes those videos and those pieces I do serve as substitutes for people who don’t get a chance to have those conversations. I get to be you at Thanksgiving. And so I’m happy to do that. And it’s nice to see that it has reached people in that way. Perhaps it's also an example of how far we are from talking to other people who are different from us. I get to see something true about the American spirit.”