-Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are competing with each other
to see who can be more extreme on culture war nonsense
in their appeals to the MAGA base
with DeSantis going so far as to ban books in schools
and give out tax breaks for gas stoves,
and Marjorie Taylor Greene
claimed at a committee hearing that elementary schools
are spending billions of dollars on critical race theory.
For more on this, it's time for a closer look.
[ Cheers and applause ]
A central thing that Donald Trump revealed
about the modern Republican Party
is they don't have a coherent worldview or agenda.
They're completely directionless.
They're basically Roombas
when they bump into something they don't understand,
they just head the opposite way.
You can see that any time Trump opens his mouth,
he doesn't talk about policies or issues.
He talks about manufactured right-wing grievances
he heard about on Fox News.
Here's one example from his recent campaign kickoff that,
as far as I can tell, makes no sense whatsoever.
-Every day for the United States is always April Fools'' Day.
This just occurred to me yesterday,
because I see what's happening.
I say, "What's going on?
What's happening? What's wrong?"
It's like April Fools'', right?
We have open borders when they should be closed.
April Fools'' Day, right?
We have prisoners and people from mental institutions
and terrorists being dumped into our country
when they should not be accepted.
April Fools'', right?
We have people in the midst of the greatest crime wave
in the history that want to defund our police.
This is again, April Fools''.
We have Antifa and BLM who hate our country
and burn down our cities,
and they're totally protected by law enforcement.
And yet they put American patriots in jail.
What's going on there?
That's all April 1st, April 1st, April Fools'' Day.
[ Laughter ]
-I know this goes without saying.
Those are all really bad April Fools'' pranks.
[ Laughter ]
Every day is April Fools' Day.
Sounds like he's pitching a sequel to "Groundhog Day".
[ Imitating Trump ] All right, so get this --
I play a local sports anchor who gets stranded
in a small town called Palm Beach, Florida.
And every day I wake up and the alarm goes off,
and the same song plays -- "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go"
by Wham! -- so, we'll have to pay to license that,
or if it's too expensive, I'll just record the sound
like "Get Me Out of Bed Before You Leave-Leave".
There you go, that part's done.
And then in the movie, I realize it's the same day
all over again -- April Fools' Day,
April Fools' Day.
But because it's always April Fools' Day,
I can't be sure if it's the same day
or if it's a prank to make me think it's the same day,
and so I learn nothing and drive off a cliff with a groundhog.
[ Normal voice ] That's right, every day is April Fools' Day.
And honestly, I don't know why he's complaining,
because he's exactly the kind of dickhead
who loves April Fools' Day.
A holiday where I lie to people
and then make fun of them when they believe me?
I'm in!
Trump is in a competition
with his likely main rival for the GOP nomination,
Ron DeSantis, to appeal to the MAGA base
by throwing up as much red meat as possible.
It's not about doing anything to improve people's lives.
It's just about making the libs mad.
Case in point, you might remember that
after yet another study linked childhood asthma to gas stoves,
there was some brief discussion about banning gas stoves,
which the Biden administration quickly made clear
it has no plans to do.
Now, again, the study found that gas stoves carry roughly
the same risk of childhood asthma as secondhand smoke.
So it's not like switching away from gas stoves
would be the worst thing in the world.
I mean, honestly, aside from dirtbags who think it's cool
to light their cigarets with them, who cares?
But Fox News lost its mind,
and then Trump and DeSantis both followed suit.
First, Trump said this --
-We have proposed mandatory electric stoves, think of that,
and electric cars.
They want mandatory stoves.
And people that are cooks -- I'm not much of a cook,
but the cooks are saying gas is better.
It's crazy what they're doing.
It's crazy.
-You know, you don't need to say I'm not much of a cook.
No one believes you've ever cooked anything in your life
unless microwaving a 3-day-old Filet-O-Fish
you found in your golf bag counts as cooking.
[ Imitating Trump ] Still warm!
[ Normal voice ] Clearly, if anyone cooks
in the Trump family, it's Melania.
[ Laughter ]
Donald, you've barely touched your diamonds.
For real...
[ Laughter ]
No one has ever looked at this picture and thought,
"Well, there's a man who knows his way around a spi--
[Laughs] around a spice rack."
I can't even imagine what Donald Trump
cooking something would look like.
To begin with, his skin is so leathery and thick,
I fully believe he could have his hand
on a hot skillet for 10 minutes without noticing.
[ Imitating Trump ] Is someone cooking ham?
Is -- Oh, son of a gun.
It was my hand again, false alarm.
[ Laughter ]
[ Normal voice ] So that was Trump's reaction.
DeSantis then had to outdo him.
You see, DeSantis's entire agenda
is just taking Fox News segments and turning them into policies.
He staged that awful migrant stunt
where he dropped them off on Martha's Vineyard
without telling them where they were going.
He moved to ban supposedly woke books from schools,
including woke math books.
And then this week he introduced a tax break for gas stoves.
-We just added, because I think it needs to be done,
no tax permanently on gas stoves.
They want your gas stove,
and we're not gonna let that happen.
You know, this is ridiculous that they --
and they do want to go after it.
They got blowback, so they kind of had to back off.
They want to go after the gas stoves.
And so we're saying, you know, we want you to be able
to buy those free of charge
from from the state of Florida for taxes.
-All right.
First of all, this dude is trying so hard
to mimic Trump's hand movements.
What -- What is this thing?
What is this thing they both do with their hands,
going out and then back in over and over again
like they're playing an invisible accordion?
They both look like flightless birds
who aren't willing to give up on the dream.
But, Ron, you're an emu.
It doesn't matter what you are, as long as you believe.
[ Laughter ]
I mean, I've never seen anyone do this
unless they were defending themselves
from accusation of wrongdoing
or showing up to a party they weren't invited to.
Hey, it's me, Uncle Terry.
I know you don't want me here...
...after I stole your purse,
but I come bearing gifts like a Marlboro Lights
and some lotto kids -- lotto tickets for the kids.
Hey, speaking of Marlboro,
you guys still got that gas stove?
Terry no got his lighty.
[ Laughs ]
[ Laughter ]
Second, not only is this silent --
[ Laughs ]
Second, not only is this stunt dumb,
according to science, it's dumb,
according to the residents of his own state,
because the vast majority of stoves in Florida
are already electric -- just 8% of homes in the state
use gas stoves and 92% choosing electric.
That's the lowest rate of gas stove use in the country.
Oh, my God, Florida uses electric stoves,
but that can only mean one thing --
Florida is
[Echoes] woke.
[ Thunder rumbles ]
[ Woman cackles maniacally ]
-April Fools'.
[ Laughter and applause ]
-Think about how dumb that is.
He wants a tax break for a thing his own residents
don't use just because it'll make the libs mad.
Also, a tax break for gas stoves is so boring.
At least when Trump does the culture wars, he goes all out.
[ Imitating Trump ] Antifa is coming to your house
to take away your gas stove
and kill Santa Claus.
They want to murder --
They want to murder Santa, 'cause he's not woke.
They want to cancel Christmas and replace it with...
-April Fools' Day.
-[ Normal voice ] I have no idea --
I have no idea what's gonna happen in the GOP primary,
and I've certainly been wrong before,
but I'm just not sure DeSantis has what it takes.
If you hire the world's greatest scientist
to build someone in a lab for Trump to make fun of,
you couldn't do better.
I mean, he's shorter than Trump.
He stands weird.
He's got those fancy, little white boots.
His full name --
His full name is Ronald Dion DeSantis.
That's 100% true.
I'm not saying DeSantis won't win,
but Trump is gonna have a field day with this dork.
[ Imitating Trump ] Many people are saying
Ron Celine Dion DeSantis likes --
wear big, white gogo boots
so he seems taller than he is.
He's a very short man, it's very sad.
And that way he stands with his chest
puffed out like a pigeon who stole a French fry.
[ Normal voice ] Trump and DeSantis,
they're just competing to see
who can win the right-wing culture wars.
That's why DeSantis has built his entire agenda
around culture war nonsense.
In fact, this week, a viral video
found at least one school library in Florida
that was basically empty because of the DeSantis' dumb rules
against supposedly woke subject matter in schools.
-It's a video that's been viewed more than 5 million times.
Empty library shelves at Mandarin Middle School
taken by a substitute teacher who says he's at a loss
for words as the school reviews the content of its books
following guidelines from the state.
Schools are now required to review their libraries
and teachers' classroom book collections to make sure
that they don't violate certain subject matter outlined
by the state of Florida.
-I've never heard of a library that was simply out of books.
That sounds like an excuse your kids would use
if you sent them to the library to do their homework,
and they skipped it to smoke weed at a strip mall.
And when you confronted them,
they'd probably just stand like Ron DeSantis.
"Kevin, where are all your books?"
"Oh, they were, uh, out?"
"The library --
The library was all out of books?"
"Yeah?"
"Okay, I'm going to, uh, take off."
And I do hope --
I do hope every pundit who claim the left is responsible
for cancel culture is losing their minds
at all the books coming off school shelves.
Because this isn't theoretical, it's real.
Teachers, librarians, school districts,
they say they have no idea what's allowed
and what's not under DeSantis' censorship laws.
So the result is this.
This obsession with critical race theory
has gotten so insane.
It came up at a congressional hearing yesterday
on pandemic aide.
Marjorie Taylor Greene,
who now has been put back on committees
by Republican leadership
after she was kicked off by Democrats,
asked the controller general of the United States
how much pandemic money
have been spent on critical race theory.
Now, that's already an absurd question,
which clearly flustered the witness.
But pay attention to the amount of money
she claims one school received to promote CRT.
-Mr. Dodaro, can you tell me
how much -- how much COVID cash went to CRT?
-CRT?
-Critical race theory in education.
-No, I do not know that.
But I do know that there's provisions
that the federal funds generally are not used --
are supposed to be used for curriculum.
-Oh.
-That's a state -- -Oh, Mr. Dodaro,
I have to tell you in Illinois
that they received $5.1 billion
at an elementary school there,
that used it for equity and diversity.
-If that's true, which it's not, I would think the problem
would be less CRT and more that one elementary school
got $5.1 billion.
She really said one school got $5.1 billion.
If that were true, other schools would be so jealous.
"We had to hold a bake sale for new soccer jerseys."
"We just financed the last two 'Avatar' movies."
[ Laughter ]
Which, by the way, movies which I'm guessing
Greene also thinks are real.
"The deep state doesn't want you to know
that all those people turn blue from the COVID vaccine,
and they're 3D now!"
So that's who the GOP thinks should be able
to serve on committees.
Meanwhile, today, they voted to kick
Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar,
a refugee and one of the only two Muslim women in the House
off the Foreign Affairs Committee
for the simple reason that they don't like her
or her point of view.
And by the way, that's not just me saying that,
even Matt Gaetz, one of the Trumpiest members
of the GOP, a guy who tried to overturn the 2020 election
and lied about the January 6th insurrection,
admitted as much this week.
-The reason I think a lot of Republicans
want to kick Ilhan Omar off of the Foreign Affairs Committee
is because they don't like what she has to say.
-You know how [Bleep] up something has to be
for me to agree with Matt Gaetz?
The only other thing we see eye to eye on
are the benefits of large foreheads.
We see eye to eye, forehead to forehead.
Even after admitting what was really going on here,
Gaetz still voted with his fellow Republicans
today to remove Omar.
He didn't even have the courage to vote no on the resolution,
even though he apparently had the courage to wear this suit.
I mean, look at that.
Looks like a bad guy from a futuristic videogame
called "Disco Crime 3000".
Republicans are censoring books in schools,
removing people from committees whose opinions they don't like,
and yet they're the ones whining about cancel culture.
The right is fully in favor of censorship when it suits them.
There's only one day a year when Republicans can say
they're defenders of free speech, and that's...
-April Fools' Day.
-This been a closer look, everybody.
[ Cheers and applause ]