Jon Stewart broke down why “Trump and the Republicans like Putin better,” during his longest monologue ever on the The Daily Show Monday night.
Just after blasting down Elon Musk for passively backing out of a would-be interview on the show and calling his excuse that Stewart wasn’t bipartisan enough, “bulls--t,” Stewart turned his attention to Trump and JD Vance’s disastrous Oval Office meeting with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday.
“The meeting has deeply wounded America’s alliance with Ukraine as well as the rest of Europe,” Stewart said on Monday, as he showed clips of the “punditocracy” trying to grapple with Friday’s spectacle.
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They’re “having a hard time figuring out the strategy,” Stewart said. But he isn’t. “You poor dumb bastards,” he said, Trump’s strategy in that meeting “makes perfect sense, if only you watched professional wrestling.” That metaphor, he said, makes it easy to understand that “Trump and the Republicans like Putin better.”
Creating tension with Ukraine in the Oval Office meeting “was a ‘heel turn’ designed to create the alliance Trump always wanted in the first place,” Stewart explained, referring to the pro-wrestling narrative device in which a fan-favorite character changes to become a storyline’s villain.
“What’s to understand?” Stewart continued, “Just listen to Putin!” he added, showing several clips of the Russian dictator parroting MAGA talking points about “traditional values,” “cancel culture,” “reverse racism,” and “attacking Christians.”
“Everyone’s wondering, ‘Why isn’t Trump aligning himself with the West?’ In his mind, he is,” Stewart continued. “Western civilization, not Europe. To most of us, Russia is not that because we, and historically everyone, has used the West to mean ‘western values.’”
But those values, for both Russia and the darkest of MAGA, Stewart argued, have started to mean “pretty f---ing gay.” Thus, “It’s not democracy versus dictatorship, or capitalism versus communism anymore. It’s woke versus un-woke. And Russia is not woke. They’re very tired. They’re comatose.”
So it’s not deranged madness that caused Trump to turn on Zelensky, Stewart concluded. It’s a “centrally planned social engineering scheme” and a “scripted arc that culminates in America betraying its old alliance for the lore of a strongman partnership that carves up the world’s rich bounties and places classic democratic values behind transactional convenience.”
“So say it with me, conspiracy theorists,” he said. “By design, it’s a new world order.”
