The Daily Show hacked by Comedy Central to promote new Trump-inspired late-night show

Comedy Central teased a likely “Nightly Show” replacement by hacking “The Daily Show,” and creating two Twitter accounts for “The President Show.”

It’s been nearly eight months since Comedy Central cancelled The Nightly Show, leading to speculation as to whether the network would eventually replace it with another politically oriented series in the vein of The Colbert Report as a companion for The Daily Show, or if it would keep in place a misnamed @midnight in the time slot.

We may get an answer soon, as the cable net has been teasing a mysterious new project on Twitter in recent days, and during a Wednesday Daily Show segment on the alleged War on Coal, which led viewers to believe that the show had been hacked by the Russians. Similar grainy footage also interrupted a South Park rerun that night and a network ad that aired during @midnight that featured a group of bears.

On Wednesday night, a Daily Show broadcast was briefly interrupted by stock war footage, a spinning ballerina and what appeared to be a man wearing a horse head mask spliced with ominous Russian music, along with a web address with a Russian domain, thepresidentshow.ru, which leads to the @PresidentShow Twitter account. According to Gizmodo, it originally contained three tweets in Russian that translated to “Make night late again, “Great things to come!” and “Make TV great again!” However, they are now nowhere to be found, and only the two tweets seen below are displayed, along with several retweets from @LateNightDonald, which has been tweeting in Trump-like fashion since March 21st on such subjects as NCIS, Mariska Hargitay, the Wonder Woman trailer, Stephen Colbert, The Walking Dead and Jimmy Fallon. Both accounts were created in February.

On Thursday, Comedy Central sent out a cryptic press release that simply read, “Late night TV is broken. A TOTAL DISASTER. I alone can fix it!” under a presidential seal, along with a link to the @PresidentShow Twitter page, whose bio reads “#1 show on television, many many millions of viewers. Hosted by @LateNightDonald. Bringing AMERICAN JOBS back to late night.”

As the AV Club speculates, The President Show project is likely to involve Trump impersonator Anthony Atamanuik, who has appeared on both The Nightly Show and @midnight, giving SNL‘s Alec Baldwin some late-night competition. Given their recent struggles in the time slot, it makes sense for Comedy Central to attempt another show led by a parody of a conservative figure à la The Colbert Report, though it’ll be difficult for nearly any show to take off against Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show given that he’s become the voice of many panicked and disenchanted liberals since Trump’s inauguration, as evidenced by his recent rise in the ratings. But it won’t be the first time the network has put a show on the air that’s centered around a sitting president. The sitcom That’s My Bush! from South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker was broadcast on the network in 2001, though it was cancelled after one season.

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This comes after The Daily Show announced this week that they are opening an exhibit in New York City this June called The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library, which will showcase some of the president’s most ridiculous tweets throughout the years. Noah confirmed their version of a presidential library on a recent Daily Show episode, and the network even setup its own Twitter account. The show is also in the midst of Third Month Mania, a March Madness-inspired bracket that allows viewers to choose the best Trump tweet of all time. The final four contains a tweet directed at Rosie O’Donnell and his infamous 9/11 “haters and losers” tweet from 2013.

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah airs Monday through Thursday at 11 p.m. on Comedy Central.