During the last Presidential election, Jordan Klepper, one of the hosts of The Daily Show, was snowed in in at Straubel International Airport in Green Bay, Wisconsin after a Trump rally.
His flight was delayed three and a half hours so he decamped to the airport bar.
Who happened to be sitting next to him? A man, dressed in a custom suit made to look like President Trump’s border wall, who had spent the previous day trying to troll Klepper and his crew as they filmed at the rally.
But instead of this turning into an argument or a fight (Klepper may be 6’4″ but was absent of his security team thanks to the snow), the two just talked. They may not have necessarily agreed with each other, Klepper realized that Brick Suit Guy, otherwise known as Blake Marnell, was not an idiot and admitted some of Trump’s weaknesses and there was a “softening” in relations.
As Klepper was getting on the plane, an airline employee asked if Klepper was prepared to accept the responsibility of sitting in an exit row and he said to Marnell, “I hope this freaks you out.” Marnell laughed, wasn’t offended and found humor in the moment, something that Klepper found optimistic about the political divide.
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This may not even be the strangest moment that Klepper has had with a Trump supporter. He was recently asked to officiate the wedding of Edward X. Young, a man who has attended over 100 Trump rallies, live on The Daily Show.
Klepper told Deadline that he doesn’t think they can make it happen. One, The Daily Show isn’t live and also, Klepper jokes, Jon Stewart would “probably want to do it and it would become a whole thing”.
“If I could bring people together. That’s my dream,” Klepper added. “As much our as media and social media wants to tell the story of partisan rancor, which is definitely there, if you push beyond that and the cameras go down, the phones get turned off and you have people who talk at airports and need officiants at weddings, that’s where I’m not a complete pessimist about the future of this great country.”
Klepper has spent more time in the middle of the country that most late-night hosts.
He has visited a lot of political rallies, mostly Trump events, for the last ten years via his Fingers The Pulse segment, which this year has been nominated for two Emmys including in the Outstanding Hosted Non-Fiction Series or Special category for its MAGA: The Next Generation special.
“I’m truly curious about what lies out there. It’s the thing only our show does. We sit in studios and we watch the news, we comment on it, but we also get to go out and talk to people and I’m always surprised by what I find. We have assumptions about what people believe. Then you get there and you get weirder shit, you get more humane shit, you get more insane shit. You get nice people. You get mean people, but you’re also face to face and engaging with them and I do find a sense of hope in human interaction. So, I continue to keep going out again and again, primarily because that’s how I get my health insurance” he joked.
While there won’t be any rallies until the midterms start kicking in, Klepper and the team are always looking for new places to be sent. “We’re always on the lookout for school board meetings or whatever,” he added.
The Daily Show Presents: Jordan Klepper Fingers The Pulse: MAGA: The Next Generation, which has nearly 2.5M views on YouTube, saw him profile the rise of youth voters for Trump. He attended a UFC fight, a college campus and spring break, where he spoke to a number of Young Republicans.
“The magic of the Finger The Pulse pieces, is we need to go someplace where there’s a pulse. We need to go someplace where people are gathered to care about a thing, and if that’s a cultural thing, that’s exciting to see what they care about, what are the passions behind that Turning Point event or a political event on a college campus. When there’s a news story that pops up that we are curious about how the base feels, let’s go there as fast as we can,” he said.
Klepper will be likely out on the road a lot in 2026 during the midterm elections. He’s looking to see whether Americans are “going to adjudicate the Trump administration and the Republicans on how well they govern”.
“You have the things like the big, beautiful bill, Epstein, and these gosh darn tariffs that are going to affect the price of eggs and whatever those weird little dolls that look like evil animals are called. They’re coming for the Labubus, they’re gonna cost twice as much and do people care? That’s what I’m gonna be curious about with the midterm. The whole point of putting a person like this in power is that they make your life better. Do you give a shit? Will you take that into the ballot box?,” he said.
Klepper will also be on the road this summer, but in a different fashion, traveling to cities including Portland, Durham, Atlanta and Austin as he works on his Suffering Fools show.
The show is part stand-up and part storytelling. “As an improv and a sketch guy, I’ve always been a little reticent to call myself a stand-up. Last year, I started going up an reading longer form stories and seeing what the responses were. Then I started to incorporate some slides and some PowerPoint to kind of utilize some of the things I was doing at The Daily Show. It’s been fun.”
As he’s been touring, he thought people would ask about the “fun, frivolous nature of entertainment” such as what it’s like to meet Paul McCartney or how tall is Jon Stewart. But he found that people wanted to know how to fix democracy or talk about infrastructure. “I want to answer that in the most entertaining form I can,” he added.
Stewart returned to host The Daily Show in February 2024, but only on Mondays, allowing Klepper, Ronny Chieng, Michael Kosta and Desi Lydic, a chance to spend some real time behind the desk.
“It feels like we’re a group of traveling theater folk who have have different jobs each week, and you help each other out. It’s a late-night show, but it’s, it’s more than that, there’s a cast of characters. One week, I’ll put on a suit, sit behind a desk and interview Bill Clinton. The next week, I’ll be given an ill-fitting Superman outfit that makes my balls look ridiculous. You have to balance those things, and that’s part of the fun of the show,” he said.
The last few weeks haven’t been the most fun in late-night, thanks to the cancelation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Klepper said it was strange because he’d had a blast hosting that week, more people had been watching The Daily Show in a decade and the show got 12 Emmy nominations. “Then we heard this news about Stephen and it broke our hearts. Stephen is obviously a member of The Daily Show family. I grew up watching Stephen and doing Stephen Colbert scenes at the Second City,” he said.
The mood was helped by Stewart, who came in on the Monday morning and talked through the news. “Jon doesn’t suffer fools and he doesn’t indulge in bullshit,” he said.
“As a member of The Daily Show, what is frustrating right now is I don’t fully buy this, this death of late-night narrative that is bubbling up,” Klepper added. “You can make arguments about the advertising structure on linear television or how it’s not financially viable for a streaming era, but from The Daily Show point of view, we have never created more content, never had more people engage or watch our show than ever before. Meanwhile, you have like this authoritarian regime that is bitching and moaning about these late-night hosts when other institutions are coming down… and you have comedians all coming together to say ‘Fuck you, we’re going to find humor where we want to find it, we’re going ot say what we want to say and we’re not going to be afraid’. That’s to be celebrated. I feel so proud to be a part of that lineage and that voice in that moment. The emperor doesn’t have any clothes. Let’s amplify the people who are pointing at it and calling it out, as opposed to the people who are bullshitting that he looks great in that gown,” Klepper concluded.
Find him at your nearest airport bar or officiating a MAGA wedding soon.