NBC’s Commander In Chief forum was a bit of a disaster according to most observers, with Matt Lauer taking most of the blame for his unbalanced treatment of each candidate during the night. Even NBC’s executives reportedly feel that Lauer’s performance was subpar and giving late night talk hosts plenty of fodder for their opening monologues.
That’s where The Daily Show comes in, taking aim at Lauer with two segments on his performance. The initial with Trevor Noah took a straight forward take on the night, giving Lauer some hefty criticism for focusing on Hillary Clinton’s emails instead of her national security policies and for allowing Donald Trump to essentially skirt by with his flimsy position on the war in Iraq. Even Esquire magazine has done the work Lauer was criticized for not doing, updating the article that Trump continues to cite with the following message:
“During the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed to have been against the Iraq War from the beginning, and he has cited this story as proof. The Iraq War began in March 2003, more than a year before this story ran, thus nullifying Trump’s timeline.”
In their second segment, Noah and Desi Lydic take a moment to take that a step further and fact-check most of Trump’s claims from his chat with Lauer. Not only do they show that Vladimir Putin’s praise of Trump might not be exactly what he thinks it is, but they also poked a hole in Trump’s criticism about Libya by showing a clip where Trump contradicts himself to Lauer’s face on a prior Today Show interview.
(Via The Daily Show)