‘The Daily Show’: Michelle Wolf Says Any Miss America Contestant Would Be A Better Leader Than Donald Trump

On the September 12 edition of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah on Comedy Central, contributor Michelle Wolf highlighted a few moments from the latest Miss America Pageant to show how any one of the 51 participants involved in the 2018 contest was better qualified to be president of the United States than its current office-holder, Donald Trump. And Wolf did it by comparing the answers of the contestants (during the question-and-answer round near the pageant’s end) to responses to the same situations faced by Trump in the past several months.

“You know, I realized that it’s actually easier to become president than it is to become Miss America,” Michelle Wolf told the Daily Show audience after showing the current requirements (“look at all those rules”) for applying to become a contestant in the world-renowned pageant.

She added, “Cause you know what the qualifications are for president? Thirty-five and born here.”

Wolf quipped that the qualifications for president sounded more like “search terms of a sad lady” on a singles matching website.

Daily Show host Trevor Noah then interjected that he did not know that there were so many qualifications required to Miss America. Wolf noted that what she had shown the audience weren’t qualifications for being Miss America — those were just the qualifications for entering the competition. She said that once in, the Miss America contestants still had to do “this crap” and showed clips of swim-suited participants, an ogling judge, and contestants performing a Bollywood dance, a saxophone solo, and a yodeling ventriloquism act.

After noting that beauty pageants are sexist, Michelle Wolf pointed out that the contests still managed to ask the participants near the end of the competition some “really hard” questions.

The screen cut to a judge asking Miss Texas, Margana Wood, about the recent violence in Charlottesville, where a white supremacist and white nationalist rally and simultaneous counter-protest eventually ended with a counter-protester dead, the result of a vehicle being driven into the crowd by a white supremacist sympathizer. The pageant judge referred to President Donald Trump’s controversial words that there was blame to be shared for the event’s violence and quoted the president saying there were “fine people on both sides.” The judge then asked Miss Texas if she agreed or disagreed and to explain her answer.

Wood took just 16 seconds to state her case.

“I think that the white supremacist issue, it was very obvious that it was a terrorist attack,” Wood began.

“And I think that President Donald Trump should have made a statement earlier addressing the fact and in making sure that all Americans feel safe in this country. That is the number one issue right now.”

Wolf commented at the clip’s end, “How crazy is that? It took the president four days and three tries to give a sh***y answer to that question, and Miss Texas nailed it in 20 seconds.”

Wolf went on to lament the lack of faith Americans have in women, joking that Miss America contestants had to be better qualified for the presidency than the president just to get to wave at people for a year. She also pointed out that “if President Trump had been in that competition, he would have finished behind last.”

Wolf then showed a video clip of a contestant, Cara Mund of North Dakota, answering a question about Trump’s recent decision to pull out of the negotiations concerning global warming where 195 countries had signed the non-binding pact. Juxtaposed with a clip of President Trump’s waffling statement about whether or not inclusion in the agreement would happen, the Miss America contestant flatly stated that belief in global warming did not matter as much as the United States remaining in a position of involvement in the worldwide talks.

Trevor Noah pointed out that the contestant seemed better prepared for the question than Trump.

Wolf dead-panned, “Well, yeah, of course. She knows that if she wins this contest, she’ll be representing America to the world. It’s a big responsibility.”

Wolf noted that the last-shown contestant wasn’t a “unique genius,” underlining that “all the contestants are like that.” After showing a clip of a contestant (Miss Missouri Jennifer Davis) saying that the investigations into the possibility of a Trump campaign collusion with Russia (in that country’s interference in the 2016 presidential election) should continue, and if collusion is determined, then the perpetrators should be punished.

Wolf reminded the audience that Trump once said he used to sneak into pageant dressing rooms.

She said, “Maybe he wasn’t being creepy. Maybe he just needed answers.”

She concluded the segment by saying, “Here’s my suggestion: Let’s switch the president with anyone from Miss America. I’d even take that weird ventriloquist lady as president. ‘Cause right now all we have is the dummy.”

The 97th iteration of the Miss America Pageant was held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on September 10. Cara Mund, representing the state of North Dakota, accepted the 2018 crown from last year’s winner, Savvy Shields of Arkansas. Mund is the first Miss America to be crowned from the state of North Dakota.

Mund herself, who once did an internship in the U.S. Senate, believes there should be more women in positions of political power. In a preliminary interview, according to the Associated Press (per KTRK in Houston), Mund said she would like to see more women at all levels of government.

“It’s important to have a woman’s perspective,” the future Miss America said. “In health care and on reproductive rights, it’s predominantly men making those decisions.”

[Featured Image by Donald Kravitz/Getty Images]