On Monday, Trevor Noah drew a connection between Donald Trump’s rhetoric and recent violence, and also talked about the line “The Daily Show” walks when trying to cover such incidents.
“One of the hardest things to do, for myself as a human, and myself as a comedian, is to try and provide context and also I think some sensitivity when dealing with issues,” Noah said in a “Between the Scenes” segment taped while filming Monday’s episode.
As an example, Noah noted it was easier to joke about the attempted bombings of several Trump critics last week because no one died. However, in the case of the Pittsburgh synagogue shootings or the murder of two black people in a Kentucky grocery store now being investigated as a hate crime, “these are all stories you want to cover, but you want to give them the right gravitas.”
“What we’re trying to do now is provide the context for what those stories mean,” Noah continued, “and how they affect where the conversation is going.”
As for that context, said Noah, “I don’t think you have to be a rocket scientist to draw the lines between these people, and the rhetoric that is being parroted by the president of the United States right now.”
However, Noah said “we live in a time and space in which you have to be careful and not jump and say ‘you made this happen, Donald Trump.’ But we can also live in a space where we say… ‘but as president, we would hope that you would try to avoid, or dissuade people from doing the same things.”
Instead, Noah said, Trump’s response has been to blame the media and that “his message has been ‘we need to come together, under my rules.’”
Watch the whole clip above.