Rachel Maddow reveals to Trevor Noah the one GOP candidate she could maybe support

Rachel Maddow is no stranger to "The Daily Show," but she made her first appearance Thursday night alongside new host Trevor Noah to talk about the House Speaker debacle, Bernie Sanders and the Republican presidential field.

The MSNBC broadcaster said Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who withdrew his name from consideration for Speaker, was "a weird choice" all along because he had relatively little congressional experience and had difficulty stringing together a coherent sentence.

"He's passed two bills the whole time he's been in Congress," Maddow said. "One of them renamed a post office for the country singer Buck Owens -- and I love me some Buck Owens -- and the other bill he passed also renamed another thing. That's it -- he's never run a committee, nothing, and he has a speaking problem."

Maddow will host a Democratic candidates forum next month in South Carolina, and Noah asked her whether she thought Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) could beat Hillary Clinton in the primary.

"I think it would be an uphill battle, but I think anything's possible," Maddow said. "I think that he probably is going to win New Hampshire."

That could completely change the race, she said.

"There's a thing that happens in politics, and it kind of happens in life, too, which is that no matter how unlikely something looks, once you get a first win -- if you're the underdog, if you win something you're not expected to win, it can change all the other dynamics," she said. "So let's say she wins Iowa, he wins New Hampshire, (and) everybody's so shocked by the fact he wins New Hampshire that I don't know what happens then in South Carolina. It could really reorder things. He wants to win."

She pointed out that some of the dozen or so GOP candidates have such little support that some polls show candidates, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), with literally zero individual supporters.

Then Noah asked a question that Maddow found nearly impossible to answer.

"If you had to vote for one of the Republican candidates, if someone held a gun to your head because Ben Carson said (to) point it that way, who would you vote for if you had to vote for one of the main 12?" Noah asked.

"Uh, I'm having back pain," Maddow finally said, after an exaggerated pause. "I think I -- I honestly don't know."

"Can I modify, can I squirrel out of the question by modifying it?" she said, after another pause. "If I were a Republican and I wanted to pick the best candidate for the general election, the person who would have the best chance against, probably, Hillary Clinton, I think that would still be hard."

"I think that might be John Kasich, (but) I don't know," Maddow said.

Watch the entire segment posted online by Comedy Central: