Trevor Noah explains why everyone's mad at Trump over GM's layoffs and plant closures
GM is in the news for the cars they are not going to make, Trevor Noah said on Tuesday's Daily Show. "GM is killing off six of their cars," he said, critiquing each model, especially the Chevy Cruze. He had several reasons for celebrating its demise, among them: "People don't want to drive a car that shares a name with Ted Cruz."
"Now look, as much fun as it is to roast GM and its cars, the sad truth is ... they're also shutting down a lot of humans' jobs," nearly 15,000, Noah said. "People are pissed off for two reasons. One: Like all big corporations, GM just got a huge tax cut, but they didn't use that money to protect jobs — no, they mostly used it to prop up the price of their own stock through buybacks." That's not surprising, since companies traditionally maximize their profits, he noted. "If a business isn't making money, it's either a charity or Trump is running it."
"And speaking of Trump, those thousands of GM workers are particularly pissed off at him, because he specifically promised that if people voted for him, he'd make sure that GM added jobs," Noah said. "So it turns out, America's top used car salesman clearly sold GM workers a lemon. And if you think about it, Trump's promises are a lot like the Chevy Cruze: You can sell them as hard as you want, but at the end of the day, no one's buying it."
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Noah also used the police shooting of 21-year-old Emantic Bradford Jr. in Alabama — police initially said Bradford shot two people in a suburban Birmingham mall, then admitted they killed the wrong guy — to argue that "the 2nd Amendment was not made for black folks." You can watch him make his case, including other examples of black "good guys with a gun" killed and white mass shooters taken into custody alive, below. Peter Weber
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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.
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