Daily Show Co-Host Shocked To Find Most Young Male Trump Voters He Met Were ‘Pretty Kind’: ‘The Cruelty Wasn’t There’

Screenshot via Comedy Central

The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper was surprised to find that young male supporters of President Donald Trump were far friendlier and less cruel than he expected.

Klepper specifically sought out young MAGA men for his Comedy Central special MAGA: The Next Generation, which will air on May 19. Klepper is known for his on-the-street pieces for Daily Show where he often engages directly with MAGA voters at rallies.

“I had such a cynical perspective of the youth walking into this thing,” Klepper told Variety about his new project. “I expected to be confronted by a bunch of dicks — 22-year-olds who want to rail on trans people in sports and kick out all the immigrants. But the cruelty wasn’t there.”

Klepper added that he found the MAGA movement for young men is more about the celebrity and image of Trump rather than being built around specific ideologies.

“This MAGA movement is inherently empty,” he said. “There’s no ideology behind it. There’s attention and fame.”

Most people the comedian talked to, he said, were “pretty kind.”

Klepper has run into “dicey” problems in the past with his hands-on coverage, however. He recalled being bum-rushed at a school board meeting he was covering, and how he and his crew fled the Capitol on Jan. 6 after they were “tripped up” by a “camouflage-wearing hooligan.”

“MAGA was suddenly framed by pundits in the manosphere as punk rock, as counterculture,” he said, adding, “the algorithms on these social media sites lean toward the aggressive and the hyperbolic, and it’s shaping the conversation.”