Jon Stewart is fed up with Donald Trump’s push to pass the so-called SAVE America Act.
The “real threat,” Stewart said on his Weekly Show podcast on Wednesday, is not illegal voting.
“They’re going to save” America by voting on the bill, he said, sarcastically. “And what it’s going to do is it’s going to protect our electoral system and our democracy from the scourge of non-citizen voting, which as you know, is in the, I think, billions,” he joked.
Lawmakers and government officials have repeatedly said that illegal voting activity is “extremely rare,” despite Trump’s claims during his State of the Union address in February.
“The real threat comes from this algorithmic manipulation of our speech, combined with the unceasing amount of money that can be thrown into the pot by these new Gilded Age, whatever they are—robber barons,” Stewart said, referring to Trump’s tech buddy billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who fund Trump’s efforts and skew social media feeds.
“It’s very clear that the irony of this is that the larger threat to our electoral system and our American democracy is the manner in which social media can spread these tropes and these inaccuracies to a really much wider group of people and light these fires,” Stewart explained.
He went on to slam lawmakers for “utterly ignoring the actual threat to our democracy.”
Instead, he said “The Senate this week, I believe, is going to be trying to figure out bureaucratic loopholes” to get the Act passed, “even though they don’t really have the votes for it, because they could never pass the thresholds of filibuster and certainly not passage, but they wanna get it done because they want to introduce the safeguards to the American electorate.”
“Because so many undocumented people, so many non-Americans, skew our elections so brutally—even though they don’t—even though there’s no evidence of it other than that, this is an incredibly crucial piece of legislation” to the president “that must be passed.”
