The Jordan Klepper Problem

No good can come of "gotcha" prol-on-the-street interviews

Post-strike comedy writers are back in the saddle just in time to throw kerosene on the dumpster fire that the 2024 election promises to be. None more so than Jordan Klepper, a Daily Show “correspondent” who specializes in getting Trump supporters to say dumb things.

For the past seven years, Klepper has shown up at Trump rallies and interviewed attendees who match his audience’s stereotypical preconceptions. You know…the beefy, red-faced, white-haired man draped in multiple layers of MAGA swag, the overweight middle-aged woman with heavy makeup, the bearded, camo-clad young guy. Most of them appear to be working class and not college-educated. They are, by and large, polite, smiley and deferential to Klepper, trying to answer his rapid-fire questions as best they can.  

Klepper’s persona is a self-righteous know-at-all with a phonily affable, deadpan demeanor that postpones the victims’ awareness that they are being ridiculed. The audience, on the other hand, is in the know. It feels good to be so smart, to know what’s about to happen and then revel in its unfolding.

The expression on Klepper’s face as he converses or slow mo’ struts past the MAGA-bedecked crowd can only be described as smug. It’s just so obvious, to Klepper and his audience, that he—and by extension, we— are head and shoulders above the Trump crowd in every conceivable way. He’s smarter. He’s wittier. He’s more knowledgeable. He’s better-dressed. One can almost pity him having to rub elbows with such cretins, a sentiment Klepper seems eager to elicit with his new show, “Suffering Fools” (billed as capturing “the pain and foolishness of our current moment, told through personal stories from Jordan’s time on the road”).

Fast on his feet, up on current events and insufferably full of himself, Klepper easily lays verbal traps for his hapless victims, then drags out the agony for viewers to savor. What they say on camera is, at turns, muddled, bitter, overconfident, distrustful, contradictory, and blatantly, one might say—comically—unmoored from reality.

Sometimes the entrapment is obvious. In some cases, the interviewee appears to be spontaneously saying something absurd but, since we don’t always get to witness the conversation from the outset, we don’t know what Klepper might have asked or said that prompted their utterances. What we can be fairly certain of is that Klepper cherry-picks the most unhinged interviews, the ones that will make his audience howl and scowl as the MAGAverse proves itself once again to be beyond redemption.

Confirmation bias is a powerful drug. It’s highly enjoyable, addictive even, to consume content that reminds us how much better we are than our enemies.

Klepper’s favorite “reveals” are of his interviewees’ hypocrisy and/or stupidity. In one of the more cringeworthy clips, a Trump fan (pictured below) is wearing a t-shirt with an image of Trump and the caption, “Never Surrender!” He tells Klepper, “Never surrender to the tyranny,” mispronouncing tyranny in a way that foreshadows the train wreck to come.

Klepper: What is Trump doing here on this shirt?

Man: This is his mugshot.

Klepper: Gotcha. So that was taken when he surrendered to authorities to have his picture taken.

Painfully long pause….

Man: Huh?

Watching the tongue-tied man stand there as the seconds tick by made me audibly groan. It brought back uncomfortable memories of The Gong Show in the 1970s. I was a child then, watching apprehensively for the next embarrassingly untalented amateur to be gonged off the stage. The public shaming ritual registered in my innocent mind as mean. It didn’t matter that the wannabe performer should have been wise enough to stay offstage. The gonging was cruel. And so is Klepper’s routine.

All we are actually seeing in a Klepper interview is a few stressful seconds in the life of a human being who came unarmed to a fight they didn’t know was happening, a human being whose averageness makes them look stupid. When we presume the things they say to be representative of the (low) caliber of Trump voters on the whole, we err.

In a parallel universe, Trump rallygoers are articulate, informed and politically heterodox. Bartender/Substacker John Russell went to a Trump rally in Pennsylvania to see if he could overcome what he calls the “engineered division” of the working class into Right and Left. Overcome it he did, conversing with Trump voters, who didn’t come across as dimwitted or crazy, about corporate greed, monopolies and corruption. That universe was available to Klepper, but didn’t fit his script. Russell found their humanity; Klepper diminished it.

In the eyes of many viewers, Klepper is beyond reproach. After all, the interviewees do say outlandish and, occasionally, bigoted things. He’s not holding a gun to their heads, he’s just putting a rake in front of them and letting them step on it.

Yeaaaah….no.  

Take, as a relatively tame example, this clip from 2019, during the impeachment proceedings.

Klepper: Do you think John Bolton should testify?

Man: No.

Klepper: Why not?

Man: Well, he could testify, but I think he’s vengeful for getting fired from his job. I think he’s a liar.

Klepper: John Bolton’s a liar?

Man: Absolutely.

Klepper: There should a system set up where he takes an oath and then, under oath, he tells the truth, otherwise he’s punished.

Man: I think there should be, yes.

Klepper: And maybe there’s a judge who’s put in charge, like, the highest judge in the land.

Man: Right.

Klepper: Appointed by a Republican. And then we can all see what he has to say. Would you be for a system like that?

Man: Sure.

Boom. Breaking news: MAGA-heads are such big morons they don’t even realize how stupid they are. Isn’t it nice to be one of us, instead of one of these pathetic losers who doesn’t even know how impeachment proceedings work?

I learned two unsurprising things about the MAGA guy from this interaction: (1) Like most hyper-partisans on both sides of the aisle, he parrots his team’s talking points; and (2) he appears to be not as sharp as Klepper. Or maybe he’s smart in other ways but, like 99.9% of human beings, is not media savvy.

If I were at a rally in support of my candidate or cause, and a right-wing interviewer caught me flat-footed, I would likely say something stupid or, at best, banal. I would grope for Team Blue talking points and try to regurgitate them, mangling them considerably in the process. If asked a follow-up question, I would struggle and stammer, forced to confront the fact that my subject matter expertise is shallow and that, like most ordinary people, I put enormous (and perhaps unwarranted) stock in my tribe’s thought leaders.

I would come home, repeatedly replay the interaction in my mind, brainstorm some less ridiculous things I could have said, and spend days marinating in self-loathing. The one thing I would not do, however, is experience the following epiphany: “You know, that obnoxious interviewer has a point.”

Klepper’s not trying to persuade MAGA team members that they’re misguided. Nor does his liberal audience need Klepper to remind them of how much they scorn and despise MAGA. How about persuadable swing voters? Might they be nudged in Biden’s direction upon seeing extreme MAGA foolishness on display?

I think not. Undecided voters are, by and large, part of the “exhausted majority” described by More in Common in their groundbreaking Hidden Tribes report. This very large group (67% of Americans by More in Common’s reckoning) is fatigued and frustrated by partisan squabbling, repelled by politics as bloodsport, and feels forgotten by and alienated from the political process. I reckon that, for them, Jordan Klepper is emblematic of the toxic polarization they are fleeing.

Most people, of any political persuasion, aspire to be decent and kind. When we’re in a semi-hypnotic state, consuming inflammatory commentary or comedy designed for our tribe, the better angels of our nature often get shunted to the back seat. After all, we are the good guys, so mocking the other side—the bad guys—isn’t really outside of our integrity. In fact, it’s noble to deride the ignorant rubes whose gullibility and stupidity threaten democracy.

My inflation-adjusted ten cents: Ridiculing the rubes is not noble. It will not save democracy, and it will not help elect Joe Biden. What it will do is make humiliated people feel even more humiliated and picked on by liberal elites. It will remind MAGA diehards of how much they hate, in Trump’s words, “the sick political class that hates our country” and entrench their longing for a Trump 2.0 revenge sequel. And it will suggest, to non-partisan onlookers, that liberal media personalities are self-serving, mean-spirited bullies and sadists who enjoy the spectacle of ordinary people’s humiliation. One could be forgiven for interpreting the show thusly: The cruelty is the point.