The Daily Show Read Kimberly Guilfoyle's Reported Amex Texts. The Texts Did the Writing

Every so often a late-night show gets a story so complete that the writers' room can take the week off and go bowling. Last week The Daily Show got one, and it came from the Wall Street Journal.

According to the Journal's report, as Kimberly Guilfoyle was getting ready for her Senate confirmation as U.S. ambassador to Greece, she asked a Trump donor, a former Kentucky congressional candidate named Eric Deters, to help pay down a $100,000 American Express bill. Texts described in the coverage include payment instructions and an assurance that a wire to Amex wouldn't show up anywhere. Deters, who says he was hoping for help with his own problems, is the one doing the talking, and I didn't find a response from Guilfoyle in the reports. She now holds the job.

Michael Kosta took it on, and he mostly let it read itself. His main note was that it wasn't subtle. In the old days, he pointed out, you'd get a suitcase of cash in a parking lot. This one came with a PDF. He called her a criminal mastermind who left a paper trail about not leaving a paper trail, which is a ten-word sentence and also a full biography.

The numbers say people wanted to see it. The clip, posted about Oct. 9 under a headline about Guilfoyle begging a donor, had about 2.5 million views on YouTube by Tuesday, making it one of the show's bigger uploads this month; a weekend follow-up, paired with Jon Stewart on AI, added another 1.3 million. That's a lot of people watching a man read a credit card statement. I've been doing that for years and nobody's ever offered me a time slot.

Here's my take. The segment works because it doesn't try very hard, and it doesn't have to. Political comedy is easiest when the people in it have stopped hiding anything, and lately they've stopped. The joke used to be that powerful people were sneaky. Now the joke is that they aren't, and the audience at home can't tell whether to laugh or to check its own statement.

There's an old rule that you never put in writing what you can say in a whisper. It's a good rule. It's just hard to follow when the job you're whispering for comes with your own embassy.