Jon Stewart Says Trump ‘Doing Us a Service’ in ‘Exposing a Reality’ About ‘Fragile,’ Disconnected Political System
Screenshot via The Weekly Show YouTube
Jon Stewart said former President Donald Trump has given the country a “gift” in exposing the “soft hum of corruption that is the engine of almost all of our business.”
On his new podcast The Weekly Show for Comedy Central, Stewart brought on Jane Mayer, chief Washington correspondent for the New Yorker magazine, and Noah Bookbinder, President of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, for a discussion on threats to democracy and the presidential election.
Stewart asked if Donald Trump and his legal woes, including recently being convicted on more than 30 felony counts, are “exposing a reality” of transactional corruption in the American political system that far preceded him.
“Is he exposing a reality? I’m not saying he’s not pushing the limit of it. I’m not saying he’s not exploiting it, but isn’t he exposing at some level a reality of crony capitalism, a reality of transactional corruption that is the heartbeat of corporate and political America?” Stewart asked.
The comedian and host of The Daily Show cited Trump’s infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger after the 2020 presidential election, in which he pushed for the Georgia official to find him 11,000 votes. Trump later called the phone call “perfect.” He’s facing an election racketeering case in the state of Georgia, a case recently paused by an appeals court.
Stewart also cited reports that the former president pushed Ukraine in 2019 to investigated Joe Biden, his then-opponent and now his presumptive opponent in November.
Mayer defended government workers against accusations of being a Deep State or being politically motivated, calling the sheer amount of money it takes to get elected today the biggest problem in American politics.
“What I’ve seen is the money has become bigger and bigger and bigger, and it is corrupting the government but it wasn’t always this way. It’s not the whole story. There are incredible numbers of people in Washington who are really dedicated to doing the right thing for the right reasons, both Republicans and Democrats,” she said.
The government, Mayer added later, works for a “handful of people who are funding it.”
“He’s identifying though a dissatisfaction and two things can be true,” Stewart said on that point. “One is there are a lot of really good, dedicated policy people and good-hearted with great integrity people working in Washington everyday to make the country work better. And number two is the system is so removed from the needs of its people and so insulated and isolated within the Beltway and within that very peculiar system within the Beltway, that it can’t actually accomplish the goal even those good-hearted people of integrity want it to.”
The comedian later called for some “reverse engineering” after Trump, arguing the former president has put some “vulnerabilities” in the system out in the open.
“In some ways, he is doing us a service in that he is like…you know how they employ a white hat hacker who will go into a system and find its vulnerabilities,” he said. “Now he’s not doing it for our benefit, he’s doing it to exploit it. But what I’m saying is, what if we take the information that he’s delivering us which is, here are the vulnerabilities in your system that I can exploit, can’t we reverse engineer that?”
Watch above via The Weekly Show.
