Jordan Klepper Has a Front Row Seat to the End of the World

Jordan Klepper has lost count of how many Trump rallies he’s attended. “We’re probably in the 30 range,” he says over Zoom. “Yeah, it’s a blur.” As The Daily Show’s resident rally-goer, Klepper has carved out a niche by picking the brains, or lack thereof, of Donald Trump’s most ardent and ridiculous supporters. “I got these front row seats to the end of the world,” he says.

In a new special titled The Daily Show Presents: Jordan Klepper Fingers The Pulse: Rally Together that airs Monday, October 28 at 11:30 p.m., Klepper returns to the field weeks before “the most consequential election of our lifetime.” But this time, he’s bringing friends. Playwright and actor Jeremy O. Harris, Guys We Fucked podcast hosts Corinne Fisher and Christina Hutchinson, and Reno 911’s Thomas Lennon accompany Klepper at various Trump rallies to see firsthand what the right has wrought.

A correspondent on The Daily Show since 2014, Klepper admits that, by some estimations, he fell on the sword by becoming the show’s go-to rally guy. “When people started asking other correspondents if they wanted to go into the field, their responses tended to be, ‘Fuck no.’” But Klepper had a different reaction. “I’m truly curious,” he says about Trump supporters. “One of the main things I do when I go out there is like, ‘Tell me why you like this person. Tell me what you’re excited about.’ Really asking them to articulate why they are there dressed in a cape with a giant foam Donald Trump hat on. I want to know why.”

To connect with the people he interviews, Klepper relies on his decades of experience performing improv comedy at Second City in Chicago and the UCB Theater in New York. “The tenets of improvisation are about saying yes,” he says. “When you’re doing compelling man-on-the-street interviews, you’re making people feel comfortable so that they share and you create something that is revealing. And I do think a lot of that starts in improvisation.” The Daily Show’s rally segments are so successful largely because Klepper approaches all of his subjects with an improviser’s open heart and from a comedy standpoint. “A journalist has to stay neutral,” he notes. “Oftentimes in a MAGA-verse, that comes across as confrontational. CNN gets a lot of people who think they’re getting into a fight with them…. One of my tactics is to really make them feel comfortable to say yes, and have them find a place that is as compelling and more real.”

Klepper is aware that his aesthetic and his Kalamazoo roots might help his interviewees feel comfortable. “Trevor [Noah] used to always joke that, ‘Yeah, we sent you in the field because you’re a white guy,’” Klepper says. “I think there’s a lot of truth in that. I have a Midwestern sensibility, and a big, tall, lanky white guy at a Trump rally often invites people to come up and engage.”

“I can’t help but look like I just came from a fishing trip,” he adds.

In the special, Klepper channels his fishing-trip energy to connect with Trump supporters at rallies in Detroit, Michigan; Latrobe, Pennsylvania; and Reno, Nevada. “We know these Trump rallies and events are like a circus. They’re like a WWE event,” he says. But during the Michigan stop, while the show is still going, Trump’s act was apparently starting to wear thin. “As Jeremy interacted with it, he started to see not only the theatricality but also the tiredness of the theatricality,” Klepper says. “Thomas Lennon, that’s what he noticed. He was like, ‘This feels sleepy.’ There’s elements of it that feel like it’s people going through the motions again. And as somebody who’s been there a lot, I’d been noticing that. But it was nice to see that confirmed by the people who we brought out who were seeing this for the first time.”

Even if there might be less enthusiasm than there was in the early days of MAGA, unexpected—and sometimes dangerous—things can still happen at his rallies. “I was there at the Stop the Steal. I was there on January 6th. And we’ve seen how these things can turn,” Klepper says. Nowadays, “I have more security than I did when I started going to Trump rallies.” Thankfully, the biggest security risk for the latest special turned out to be Reno 911 fans asking for pics with Lennon, who was dressed up as his beloved Lieutenant Jim Dangle. “They loved him,” says Klepper. “The only security that we needed was basically to keep people off from getting selfies.”

A strange economy has bubbled up around Trump rallies, Klepper notes. “We run into people who are diehard MAGA fans, and what they’ve found is their opportunities for attention,” he says. “They’ve turned it into Twitter accounts. They’ve turned it into TikTok accounts. They’ve turned it into small-time businesses. There’s so much around the economy of Donald Trump, which is less about ideology and more about, ‘How do I turn this fervor into a way to get eyeballs, or even more so, get money out there?’”

In the new special, Klepper spends time with one such person—Edward, who’s been to over 90 Trump rallies. Although they are not politically aligned, it’s clear in the special that he and Klepper share a mutual fondness. “Edward, he feels like your uncle who you have an affinity for, who you love. And you might disagree with, gosh darn, most of the things he says,” Klepper says. “But you don’t think that it’s coming from a place of hate. It’s a place of disagreement, and it might frustrate you, but you still give him a hug after you’ve thrown that plate of mashed potatoes during Thanksgiving because he said that one strange thing.”

Klepper is aware that some people might judge him for engaging with the Edwards of the world at all, but he thinks that sort of contact is necessary if we ever want to move beyond our current political moment. “With somebody like Edward, it is important to understand where he’s coming from and to have these conversations,” says Klepper. “In this piece, we tried to have him have multiple conversations with people there to see that these conversations are possible. I think we need more of that. We need more vulnerability in our democracy, and an understanding that people aren’t just these ideologues who hate each other on either side.”

While it’s easy to dismiss people like Edward, Klepper believes it’s foolish to do so. “If you are from the left, it’s so easy to see the MAGA movement as just a bunch of crazy people, and I think that is a mistake,” he says. “I think you can see their opinions as crazy, but I think it devalues the MAGA supporters to call them crazy. It takes away the humanity and the human nature of the ways in which these messages can attract and also manipulate people.”