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On Wednesday night’s Daily Show, Trevor Noah had a lengthy interview with Tomi Lahren, a woman who you may not know by name, but if you have Facebook, you definitely know her face. Lahren is the blonde, beautiful conservative pundit whose videos for The Blaze — in which she aggressively smacks down folks like Colin Kaepernick, the Black Lives Matter movement, and most recently the people protesting outside Trump Tower in the wake of the election — are all over social media. If you’re scrolling through and a woman who looks like a Malin Akerman character starts angrily ranting about entitled thug coastal elite snowflakes who should shut up and salute President Trump … that’s Tomi.
Noah had Lahren on for an interview on Wednesday (the full extended version of which is up on the Comedy Central site this morning), and he didn’t back down for a second. His introductory salvo got to the heart of Lahren’s appeal: “Why are you do angry?” Noah and Lahren sparred over various conservative issues, from Trump to immigration policy to whether it’s fair to call the Alt Right the Alt Right (Noah: “It’s what they call themselves”) to whether it’s fair to say that now that Trump is in power, Tomi Lahren is the “mainstream media” she’s always railing against.
But for the most part, Noah’s interview stuck with Lahren’s most popular talking points: why people who protest ought to sit down and shut up. One of Lahren’s most widely circulated videos was a screed against Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback whose refusal to stand at attention during the playing of the “Star-Spangled Banner” before football games touched off a national controversy. While Lahren stuck to her main talking point — that while she defends Kaepernick’s right to protest, she reserves the right to find him stupid and ungrateful for choosing the anthem and the flag to protest against — Noah asked her a direct question in response: If Kaepernick shouldn’t be protesting the anthem or the flag, and Black Lives Matter are thugs and whiners for taking to the streets, just how should people protest their government and institutions these days? Lahren didn’t really have an answer for that, and she and Noah continued to spar, though said sparring was largely polite (if wildly tense).
Noah did his best to retain some sense of humor in the face of such heavy, angry political topics. When Lahren busted out the old chestnut “I don’t see color” to defend charges of perceived racism, Noah was quick to snap back “Then what do you do at traffic lights?”
In a world where Facebook is king, old right-wing provocateurs like Ann Coulter may be moving past relevance, but Tomi Lahren appears to be what’s in fashion for blonde, angry conservative women these days. That Noah was the first late-night comedy host to take her on shows that The Daily Show is looking ahead.
[Watch Trevor Noah’s Extended Interview with Tomi Lahren on Comedy Central]
