(upbeat rock music)
- It's impeachment week again.
So I'm back in Washington DC,
where our Capitol is a bit different
from the last time I was here.
It is hard to figure out how to get in towards the Capitol.
I wanna get to the Capitol, can I?
- [Officer] Go all the way down to Constitution.
- There are miles and miles of fences.
Somebody get on Parlor or something
to figure out how to get in there.
And the thousands of screaming MAGA folks is down to two.
What do you think of the impeachment?
- Like the sign says,
it wasn't the president who caused the riots.
- What I saw and what there's a lot of evidence showing
is that many of the initial people who entered
the building violently were leftists, you have Antifa.
- I was here, it seemed like a lot
of people were Trump supporters.
A thousand people broke into the Capitol,
erected a noose outside, and tried to kill
the speaker of the House and the vice-president.
- Hey, I literally think that you have added the
tried to kill all those things, and you have ignored
- I gotta show you some videos.
- [Supporter] the 200- - [Jordan] I gotta-
- You wanna trade videos?
Cause I'd love to share a video with you as well.
- I'm not gonna give you my email.
Yet the MAGA faithful aren't the only ones
who want to go to the video.
- House prosecutors plan to, quote,
"Have a fast-paced, cinematic case."
- Raskin is aiming for a blockbuster action film this week.
- Yes, impeachment two is bigger and louder
and more cinematic than the first one.
Because as we all know,
when you're dealing with American audiences,
stunning imagery goes farther than facts.
What are you doing?
Are you doing the spinning bad boy shot?
No, we always do the bad boy shot, stop it.
I understand the Democrats' movie making angle.
But how was this blockbuster approach playing
with the few locals we could actually find?
The first impeachment gets in the weeds,
feels a little bit more
like a complicated spy drama made by a foreign director.
This new one?
- This new one I think is just so obvious.
You know, as well as drama and chaos.
Unfortunately, murder and sedition.
You know, it has all of the good plot twists of a crime.
- [Resident] I'm not excited about it,
because the fact that it has to happen is
because something horrible happened in the first place.
- You're not excited for the new impeachment.
Would you say you're getting too old for this shit?
- I am Bruce Willis too old for this shit.
- Don't you mean Danny Glover?
- You know.
- Lethal Weapon, Danny Glover.
I guess Bruce Willis was getting too old
for the Die Hard series in and of itself.
All I'm saying is somebody needs to say,
"Hasta la vista baby," am I right?
- [Resident] As long as there's not a third movie,
I'll be great.
- I hope you're right.
Although, we do have a villain who's never been
held accountable in his life,
it kinda keeps the franchise open.
- I think they had a good opening day with the video,
and I think Jamie Raskin did a really good job of explaining
that some people were either getting ready
to just hide behind their desk
or like grab a pair of scissors and go out.
- It's screenwriting 101, make it personal,
give us people to care about.
- Exactly.
Where's Jordan Peele, he should be
an impeachment manager. - Jordan Peele needs to
get up here, I don't know.
He's too busy making scary stuff
that I only stay through half of.
Because it's both scary and I have
certain race guilt issues because of my privilege.
Showing hours and hours of footage of blatant criminality
seems like a sound legal tactic.
So how does the 2020 lead impeachment manager,
Adam Schiff, feel the sequel stacks up to the original?
- Ours might have been more the Ken burns documentary,
this might be more of the HBO miniseries.
But you know, we had to try to bring to life
events that were happening half a world away in the Ukraine.
Here, you don't have to imagine anything
because the senators were there,
the house members were there.
We watched it on our television screens.
- Why do you think the impeachment is necessary?
- It's absolutely necessary.
If he's not disqualified now,
if the senators don't follow their oath
and don't follow the evidence and he's acquitted again
and he decides to run again,
he will put the country through hell again.
- Is accountability really America's thing?
I mean, that's, we're better
at like BBQ would wrap around sunglasses.
- You know, I think that the lack of priority
on accountability over the last several years
has been why we're in this predicament.
- There are critics who say, Congress should go back
to doing more important things, like stopping
the space lasers that are causing all the wildfires.
Should we be focusing on those big, important issues?
- This points to another huge problem, not the lasers.
- The wildfires.
- (chuckles) But the people who believe
- The people who believe. - in that cookie crazy,
batshit, conspiracy theory stuff.
They're members of Congress now.
- How do you convince people who are both witnesses
and jurors to a crime that a crime actually occurred?
- The Republican Party needs to be a party
of ideas and ideology again.
At the end of the day, what this is really about,
is can they find the courage to tell their constituents
back home that what they were fed
by Donald Trump was a bunch of lies?
- So you're banking on the courage of someone like Ted Cruz?
Good luck with that.
- If I was gonna bank on that,
I would be bankrupt a long time ago.
- I was gonna say he won't even stand up for his wife,
let alone the country, so.
So the final jury is the American people,
which in like rotten tomatoes,
it's like the critics score versus the audience score.
Now the first impeachment was great, critics loved it.
Audience was so, so on it, but maybe for this new one
the audience score pops right up and there's a conviction?
- Well, I'm hoping that the audience score
and the senators score are in alignment and they both say,
"We never wanna see the likes
of Donald Trump in office again."
- So, will impeachment two, don't rush to judgment day,
move any Senate republicans to convict Trump?
As I look around our transformed Capitol
for signs of hope, I know...
No more boy shots, okay!
I, I'm, I'm, I'm, no, no.
("The Daily Show" theme music)