Jon Stewart may find MAGA’s reaction to Donald Trump’s latest moves “alien,” but he has a theory for why the base doesn’t “give a s--t.”
Trump’s rhetoric is “too flattering” for a certain demographic, Stewart said on a new episode of his Weekly Show podcast. “That nostalgia… to a group of people that feel—and by the way, many of them feel rightfully—let down, that the systems that we talked about that created the prosperity in the world, did leave them behind. And our system was not fast enough to catch up.”
Stewart continued, “We did have a problem with not gaining control over immigration. None of these stories is completely invented out of whole cloth.” Still, he said, the “nostalgia” Trump employs to “play to the passions and prejudices” of his base offers no real solution to the systemic changes needed to improve the survivability of Middle America.
“The dopamine hit that they get, this is algorithmically driven,” he said, as he and guest Fareed Zakaria unpack the “old days” posts that Trump and those in his administration habitually post to social media.
“They sell a story of you being forgotten, and of a country in decline, and of a people that have been abused and victimized, and this man, what does he say? ‘I am your vengeance. I will fight for you.’ And they don’t give a s--t how he does it or how punitive he is. And if that means threatening to arrest the Fed chair, so be it,” he continued, referencing the DOJ’s “unprecedented” criminal investigation into Jerome Powell.
“That’s how it’s all done,” Stewart said. “They’re selling a story that the reason why eggs are expensive is because some Somalis in Minnesota f---ed with a Medicaid program. Not that we spend a trillion dollars on, like, military equipment—soon to be $1.5 trillion—or not that we subsidize corporations and they suck a lot of the prosperity out of this country and they don’t distribute it in any way within the country, in any way that resembles fairness.”
Stewart concluded, “None of that matters to them.”
The Daily Show host also pointed to the ICE shooting of Renee Good, as well as Trump and MAGA’s response to it.
“Let’s take Minneapolis as an example,” he said. “There were a lot of different ways that they could have accomplished de-escalating that situation beyond killing the person... but they chose that.”
He added later, “But when they have a choice, Trump says, ‘We could do it the easy way, or we could do it the hard way.’ I think what they like is doing it the hard way, because the hard way is a way of showing power.”
Yet another example, Stewart pointed to is Trump’s approach to immigration. “There is a way for them to do immigration enforcement in this country that doesn’t involve beating the shit outta people in target parking lots,” he said. “Everything is done in the most egregious manner they can possibly think of because they want the fight.”
“That’s what makes me think, oh, you know what, this isn’t even incompetence... this is the plan. What their end game on that is, I don’t know.”
