Jon Stewart isn’t ready to declare America completely “f---ed.”
“I’m not saying he’s not going to do grievous damage, but isn’t that what you do after a devastating storm? You rebuild. You put in the work, and you make some changes to the grid,” the Daily Show host said in response to a fan question about whether “There’s anything we can do to stop the damage Trump is doing,” on the heels of his bid to take over Greenland.
“Nope—disagree,” Stewart continued. “That attitude, no. Hard pass… Anything he does can be redone or done better.”
Stewart likened Trump’s impact on the United States to a bad storm from which the country can, and has, bounced back.
Post-Trump, he said, “You say… maybe we shouldn’t bury all the electrical wires underground, near the salt water, now we’re going to put them somewhere else, where they can be... we’ll make changes.”
He admitted it would take some heavy lifting, but insisted it could be done: “Now that is not to say that that’s happening a week from now. And it could be catastrophic.”
“But we forget, through the arc of history,” dark periods have turned around, he explained. “After the Civil War….it didn’t last as long as it could have, because they decided to appease the South, and so Reconstruction went the way, and Jim Crow soon settled in, so even the rebuild doesn’t necessarily always go the way you want it to go. But f---, man, no.”
Stewart suggested that there’s value in trying to understand why Trump does what he does. One methodology he tried to unpack with his episode’s guests was the president’s fascination with Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s “special relationship” with the Russian leader symbolizes the new “polarity of the world,” he said. “We were going to prove that capitalism and democracy, and the consent of the government was far preferable, not just morally, but also in terms of tangible result, than these other authoritarian regimes. That original bargain, that original, sort of, what drew us together, I think, is over.”
“And what appears, to me, to be is it is now an alliance, Trump being merely an implement of that… between woke and not woke. And that’s how they’re drawing,” Stewart continued. “So when everybody talks about, ‘What does Putin have on Trump? Putin doesn’t have s--- on Trump. They agree. That’s what everyone’s trying to hide here: That side of America agrees: We want a less gay-friendly, more religious, anti-elite—ruled by strongmen.”
Stewart also offered his theory for why Trump—not a traditional conservative, as his guests point out—is so invested in that image of America.
“He thinks only in terms of legacy. He puts his name, like an 8-year-old, on everything that he owns,” he said. “And he views through the prism of history, this idea that, ‘I’ll be the Louisiana Purchase Guy... I’ll get America, Alaska. I’ll get them Greenland.’ I almost think he’s thinking, it’s not about that he doesn’t think past his lifetime—it’s that he doesn’t think about what we’re going to need to manage and hold on to this new world order that he’s created.”
