On Monday night’s episode of “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart poked fun at President Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 concert series, which saw more than half of the performers drop out.
“Hey, hey, I need some good news. I need some reassurance. And I’m going to tell you why,” Stewart said at the beginning of his monologue. “Because, as many of you know, the big Freedom 250 concert that I was looking forward to… ran into some issues.”
Stewart then cut out a clip from NBC News reporting that five of the nine musicians scheduled to perform at Freedom 250 withdrew, citing “political concerns.” Those who left the event included Martina McBride, Young MC, The Commodores, Morris Day, and Bret Michaels.
In the wake of the mass exodus of artists, Stewart asked, “Are any of them still performing?” The answer came in the form of an enthusiastic TikTok from rapper Vanilla Ice, who exclaimed in the post, “America is about to turn 250! It’s such an honor to be in concert with you all. We’re bringing back the ’90s.”
“Come on!” cried Stewart. “See? Everyone fell out, but Vanilla Ice didn’t fall out. Vanilla Ice didn’t fall out. He found a problem, and yeah, he solved it.”
After Freedom 250 began to fall apart, Trump declared that he wanted Truth Social to be “cancelled,” but it wasn’t clear whether he was referring to the entire concert series or just the shows with the withdrawn artists. He also used the opportunity to harshly criticize the “crooked judges” who had ruled against him in his bid to take control of the Kennedy Center.
“Please stop,” President Trump wrote on Saturday night, “just as my presence at the Kennedy Center ended my involvement in a failing and dangerous facility because a highly contradictory and perverse federal judge said I could not be allowed to spend time and money making the center great again, in fact, much greater than it was before! It would have been nice if a coalition of Republicans and Democrats had revived it. The Kennedy Center is broken, Judge Cooper also said that the very honorable board had no authority to name it “Trump” even though it would take hundreds of millions of dollars of my time and money to reincarnate it. So now Judge Cooper and his wife Amy Jeffress should be ashamed. President Donald J. Trump, like the many other crooked judges who have tried my case, should be impeached. ”
Watch the full monologue below.
