During a Thursday night segment, Westworld star Jeffrey Wright helped The Daily Show team deliver a gold-plated, satirical tribute to Donald Trump’s first term’s many accomplishments.
In the seven-minute segment, entitled, “The Greatest President In the History of All Time,” Wright’s deadpan narration ironically spurns Donald Trump’s political achievements, dancing between his policies, infamous appearances and most famous lines to highlight a destructive political impact. As the award-winning actor walks viewers through Trump’s oratory and cabinet blunders, the real “greatness” of the 45th president’s administration is laid painfully bare.
Wright introduces the satirical documentary-meets-propaganda clip through a montage of former presidents. As images of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan slide onto the screen, the Batman actor calls them America’s smartest and boldest, before an image of Barack Obama labels the 44th president “Africa’s worst.”
“But now of all the presidents, America is blessed to be living under its greatest,” Wright’s gravelly voice says over a sweeping orchestral arrangement.
Accompanied by fifes and drums, Wright takes viewers back to America’s revolutionary beginnings, where George Washington “won our freedoms from the hostile takeover of Meghan Markle.” However, Wright promises that Trump’s military prowess is even greater, detailing how Trump administration’s policies like his travel ban kept “hordes of Muslim invaders from converting your home into a mosque.”
As Wright extolls the patriotic sacrifices of Trump’s domestic and foreign policies, images of travel ban protests, crying members of separated families and figures like Hasan Minhaj and Kumail Nanjiani cycle on the screen. The segment then pivots to paralleling Reagan’s famous Berlin wall speech with Trump’s border wall, which has seen him “defeat even Mexico’s mightier armies.”
The actor’s narration continues to compare Trump’s work on environmental and foreign policy in the White House to the work of previous administrations, balancing clips of the president’s infamous moment in which he seemingly stared at the solar eclipse with his open embrace of dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un and the ever-growing list of former cabinet members who have since become “traitors.” However, some of the video’s most comically effective moments are when Wright sets up Trump to deliver the punchline instead of doing it for him.
The segment ultimately wraps on Trump’s re-election campaign, but not before offering up the president’s inability to properly pronounce words like anonymous and Thailand as further proof of his “greatness.”
“Yes, it truly has been four years of stunning accomplishmenmshaez,” Wright says.
Watch the segment below.
