The Daily Show's Trump Heaven Clip Hit 7.8 Million Views. So Did 60 Minutes
Jon Stewart's Monday segment on Trump's afterlife plans and Stephen Miller's promotion matched the CBS interview's TV audience in two days on YouTube.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min readSunday night, 60 Minutes aired a post-midterm interview in which correspondent Ross Douthat asked President Trump what happens to him when he dies. Trump said he hopes to get to heaven and would rather not go to hell, which puts him in agreement with most of the species. Asked if he could forgive enemies like James Comey and Nancy Pelosi to get in, he said probably not, adding, 'I do hate some of my enemies.' St. Peter has heard a lot of opening statements. That one's going on the wall.
Hours after he taped it, Trump also announced that Stephen Miller would replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff, an odd move for a man who'd just mused that his immigration policies may have been too tough. It's like telling your doctor you'll cut back on salt and then hiring a salt lick as your nutritionist.
Monday, Jon Stewart's Daily Show took on both stories, and the YouTube upload, titled for the heaven question and Miller's promotion, had about 7.8 million views by Wednesday afternoon. Here's the neat part: Nielsen counted 7.8 million TV viewers for the 60 Minutes interview itself, a figure TheWrap called the second-smallest such audience since 2015. A comedy show's clip of the interview caught the original in under 48 hours. CBS spent decades building that brand. The Daily Show spent an afternoon making fun of it.
I'm not going to recite jokes I can't verify from the clip, and frankly you can watch it, it's free, which is more than you can say for heaven. But the numbers tell you what the audience wanted: not the confession, the commentary. Americans will always prefer hearing what the man said from someone who'll roll his eyes at it.
For context, this one did well against Stewart's own recent run, too: earlier this month his pre-midterm Trump segment drew 2.8 million and his Haley Stevens segment 4.1 million. Trump's soul nearly doubled them. It's the most attention the thing has gotten in years.
The lesson, as ever, is that you can't go wrong betting on a man's eternal fate. Everybody wants to know where he's headed, and nobody wants to go with him.