Trevor Noah has put his confrontation with Donald Trump back in the spotlight, using his new Netflix standup special, Joy in the Trenches, to revisit the clash that followed a Grammys joke about the president’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. The special was released on Tuesday.
Noah said Trump threatened to sue him in February after the joke, and he recalled the president’s warning: “Get ready Noah, I’m going to have some fun with you.” Noah mocked the line onstage, saying, “That last line is something: ‘Get ready, Noah, I’m going to have some fun with you!’ You know, if you’re not trying to sound like a sexual deviant, this is not the line I would recommend,”
The exchange lands with extra weight because Noah has spent years making Trump part of his comic material. He succeeded Jon Stewart on The Daily Show in 2015 and hosted The Daily Show with Trevor Noah until 2022, a run that made politics a nightly subject long before this latest flare-up. Earlier this year, he also hosted the Grammy Awards for the sixth time, which is where the joke at the center of the dispute aired.
Onstage, Noah said he was joking that Billie Eilish’s Song of the Year award “is a Grammy that every artist wants almost as much as Trump wants Greenland, which makes sense because Epstein’s island is gone, he needs a new one to hang out with Bill Clinton.” He added, “Turns out the president watches the Grammys,” and said, “It hits different when you’re in the crosshairs, I’m not gonna lie.” Noah said Trump had written a lengthy post giving him “a Google review of my performance,” and claimed the post said he had “never” been accused of visiting Epstein’s island. Noah shot back, “Really? I was the first?”
That is the friction inside the story: Trump’s anger was not aimed primarily at Noah for most of the years he hosted The Daily Show. While Noah regularly targeted Trump on the show, the president’s social media ire had mostly landed on Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. Noah also said he left The Daily Show and “relaxed like an idiot in a horror movie,” only for the old target to return when he thought the danger had passed.
Noah’s punch line on the whole fight is that he may have been the one to set it off, even if he never meant to become the center of it. “I hosted The Daily Show for seven years, and for seven years, news and politics in America, right? Because that’s what the show is,” he said. Then he pushed the joke further: “Before me, no one had ever mentioned Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. I was the first. I’m the reason his name is mentioned 5,000 times in those files. I set those dominoes into place to kick them all down,”
For Trump, the special turns a one-off social media outburst into a comic memory that Noah can now replay on his own terms. For Noah, it settles the immediate question: he is not treating the threat as a turning point, but as another burst of outrage from a man he says watches TV, gets angry and moves on. As Noah put it, “I’ll be honest, I wasn’t too worried, you know, Donald Trump watches TV regularly, gets angry about what he sees, posts about it, and oftentimes he moves on.”
