Celebrated comedian Jon Stewart hurt himself while delivering a monologue on US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE budget cuts and the rising price of prescription drugs on the February 24 episode of The Daily Show. During his impassioned speech, Stewart picked up a coffee mug and smashed it, sustaining injuries in his hand.
What happened to Jon Stewart?
Jon Stewart served as the host of the February 24th edition of The Daily Show. Toward the end of his monologue, he smashed his “World’s Best Dad” coffee mug and injured his hand in the process. “I will be going to the hospital,” he quipped afterward.
The main topic of the segment was the sweeping budget cuts initiated by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE under the Trump administration. Stewart eventually began speaking about the pharmaceutical industry, noting the “tax breaks,” “research grants,” and “patent extensions” worth billions of dollars that these companies get from the government and how that should be one of the targets of an organization like DOGE.
Stewart observed that in return for the above-mentioned privileges allocated by the government to those companies, the public gets “the highest drug prices in the Western Hemisphere.”
He then criticized the deal between pharmaceutical companies and Medicare that the Biden administration oversaw last year, which was set to cut the prices of 10 medications generally taken by elderly individuals. “But you know what’s so horrible about our system now? And the corruption that lays within it? We’re so f—— numb to it, we actually tout tiny cracks in that exploitation as victory,” Stewart said, while a clip featuring Joe Biden and Kamala Harris played on the screen.
The host asked in a scathing and sardonic tone whether the companies that American people “subsidize with billions of dollars are allowing us the privilege of negotiating the price of 10 of their drugs.”
Stewart continued, “And 10 is all of them, right? It would be embarrassing if it was a small drop in the bucket and that the American people didn’t expect that we should negotiate for all their f—— drugs! Because we’ve already paid for ’em with our subsidies!”
This is when Stewart broke the mug. Realizing what had happened, Stewart immediately placed the hand under the desk, though it appeared on the screen a couple of times at the tail end of the segment.
