The show began with Michael Loftus, a standup comic and television producer, who also served as the night's host. With black framed glasses and short gray hair, he looked like a guy you'd see pecking away at a MacBook in your local liberal coffee shop. His set contained a few jokes and impressions of former presidents, but he mostly just pandered to the base, with plenty of applause breaks for any mention of Trump and the general Republican brand. He eventually brought up the Deplorable Choir, three self-described "housewives from Houston" in matching "Damn Deplorable" shirts and MAGA hats singing original songs with lyrics seemingly spat out of a right-wing AI machine: "I have a dream of a beautiful wall/There on the border 20 feet tall/Deadbeat Congress ain't worth no lick/So we're gonna build it brick by brick," went one number.