US President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for 2018 wants to beef up the military while starving government programs like Meals on Wheels.
So “Daily Show With Trevor Noah” correspondent Roy Wood Jr. has a clever idea. If the Trump administration loves the military so much, why not disguise Meals on Wheels as a military venture?
Introducing: Meal Team Six.
What follows is a hilarious satire loaded with pointed critiques of the administration.
A group of “soldiers” in combat gear patrol a neighborhood in a heavily fortified tank, scope out Meals on Wheels mission plans, and fire food into people’s homes.
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A lot is packed into the short skit.
First, the Daily Show reminds the audience that 500,000 of the 2.4 million elderly people who receive Meals on Wheels are veterans who rely on and have a deep appreciation for the meals and companionship of the program.
Two veterans star in the sequence — Peter and Irene. They’ve both been receiving meals for many years.
“I’ve been with Meals on Wheels since 1990, I get their meals three times a week, and I enjoy them very much,” Peter says.
The skit then has a three-pronged critique of the military. One is that the government spends an exorbitant amount on the military — more than the next 8 countries combined — a lot of this money goes to waste, and programs described as military often have very little oversight, as was the case in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since so little oversight exists, maybe Meal Team Six could slip by unnoticed.
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Next, by showing this bumbling group failing to effectively deliver meals, the skit suggests that military missions are often carried out haphazardly — as was the case in the Trump administration’s first raid in Yemen, full of collateral damage.
Finally, the skit satirizes the jarring absurdity of seeing war equipment in quiet neighborhoods — an increasingly common sighting as police forces across the US receive the Pentagon’s excess war equipment.
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Through all this satire, the skit underlines the good done by Meals on Wheels and how spending money on helping the elderly makes more sense than fueling wars.
Like fellow late night host John Oliver, Noah isn’t afraid to go after injustices in the world, and he’s skilled enough to deal with them in disarming ways.
“Let me get this straight,” Noah says in the opening of the sequence. “The Trump administration will defend Putin, white supremacists, and sexual assault, but ‘delivering food to old people? That’s immoral. I have to look at my family at night.’”