Jordan Klepper Reflects on a Decade of Attending MAGA Rallies for The Daily Show

The decision to attend and record “man-on-the-street” interviews at MAGA rallies wasn’t a difficult one for Jordan Klepper. “Well, I got hired by The Daily Show, and Jon Stewart said, ‘You have to go to rallies,’” the comedian told an audience in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. “So I started going to the rallies for health insurance.”

Klepper’s remarks were given during a “fireside chat” at the Together for Democracy conference, hosted by Democracy Forward. Skye Perryman, president and CEO of the nonprofit legal advocacy organization that has been on the front lines of litigating the second Donald Trump presidency, moderated the conversation.

Klepper told the audience that he began to see a shift in what people were willing to admit fairly early into his decade of interviewing Trump supporters at rallies. He speculated that when he began, only about one in 10 of those he spoke with on camera would admit to believing in birtherism, the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

“At the time, it was collectively known as something that was not only untoward, but racist,” he said. Within a couple of months after Trump announced his 2016 presidential candidacy, Klepper estimates that seven in 10 openly shared that belief in interviews with him. “Now, I don’t think that was a total shift in the number of people who believed it,” he said. “But it at least dropped the norm for people who were OK with sharing it.”

Perryman asked Klepper if the situation at MAGA rallies has gotten worse. He replied, “Well, I can report that it hasn’t gotten a ton better,” eliciting laughter from the crowd.

Optimism Denied

Klepper reflected on brief moments of optimism that were quickly snuffed out by reality. He pointed to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as an example.

“There was a moment when the country was looking at the video and seeing the same thing,” he said. “That was before there was a narrative of culpability, a reason why January 6 happened, [such as] Antifa or ‘it was a righteous act.’ And I realized that the movement moved beyond coming up with a rational explanation for what happened, to just throwing shit up against the wall as a way to move on from any culpability and toward what they wanted to feel.”

One particular experience led Klepper to reflect on the ideas of identity and group cohesion that MAGA offers.

During Trump’s first impeachment, when the president was blocking administration officials from cooperating with Congress, Klepper was in a back-and-forth conversation with a Trump supporter who insisted the president was innocent. “He’s the most transparent person on the planet,” she told Klepper. “If he was guilty, he’d be trying to stop people from talking.”

Klepper asked her, “So if he was blocking people [from testifying], that would be an admission of guilt?” After she said yes, he reminded her that was exactly what Trump was doing.

“And she takes a long beat to really take it in,” he said. “And then she goes, ‘I don’t care.’”

Self-Preserving Identities

Klepper reminded the crowd that, in many ways, MAGA supporters aren’t that different from anyone else with deep connections to a movement, such as a sports team, that gives them a sense of belonging and identity. He and Perryman shared stories about their respective university connections and how easy it is to ignore facts to preserve a sense of identity and institutional loyalty.

Klepper’s family consists of University of Michigan fans who are quick to make fun of MAGA supporters’ “blind loyalty,” but who have a hard time believing the verified facts surrounding their 2023 football signal-stealing scandal. Perryman is a graduate of Baylor University, whose football program went through a years-long sexual assault scandal. She spoke about people she knows and respects who refuse to believe what has been proven to be true about that period.

“We all have our cults,” Klepper said. He joked, “I joined an improv comedy cult for the longest time.” Through audience laughter, he said he believes this speaks to something deeper within all of us:

“We turn to some of these institutions. We turn to religion. We turn to political affiliation. We turn to anything that allows us to take the weight of our own humanity off our own shoulders for a second. And it is hard and exhausting to have to, day in and day out, weigh the decisions you make and the way in which you see the world. And so you look for any kind of system that removes that weight from your shoulders, because being human is hard.

“What happens in the MAGA movement is they take a parade and they march it through a small town, and people show up. Why? Because they want joy… Everybody wears hats, they put on silly T-shirts, and they cheer in the same direction. And that feels good. That is a human thing.

“But the price that comes with that is you remove your own accountability and your own way of thinking and give it over to a political movement that has no North Star other than whatever serves the impulses of one man, and with that, it’s such a danger to be pulled into that culture mentality.”

Klepper encouraged the Together for Democracy audience to resist the temptation to call people “crazy” and instead to find areas of shared humanity. For him, that is found in laughter.

“If we can laugh at something, we can diffuse how scary it can be,” he said.