The White House is up in arms over Jon Stewart’s comments calling out Donald Trump’s IRS settlement, with a spokesperson telling the Daily Beast the Daily Show host is a “talentless hack.”
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle also said Stewart “clearly suffers from a severe and debilitating disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain and ruined his life to the point he has to compensate for his embarrassing inadequacies.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Stewart for comment.
The outburst came after Stewart, 63, skewered the Trump administration on his The Weekly Show podcast, where he said the president’s $1.8 billion “smash and grab” slush fund to help “victims” of the Biden administration was a “f--- you troll.”
“It’s all a f--- you troll. Everything they’re doing is a f--- you troll to us,” Stewart said on Wednesday.
On Monday, President Trump, 79, and the Department of Justice announced a taxpayer-funded $1.776 billion account—in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary—to distribute money to people who claim to have been persecuted by the Biden administration.
The announcement came swiftly after Trump dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS.
The following day, the DOJ refused to rule out that the fund would be used to aid violent January 6 insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
“This is f---ing our money!” Stewart reacted on his show. “I mean, it’s—do we even have a Congress or a Court?”
“It’s all Orwell,” he continued, referencing the draconian government from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. “Oh, this is against the weaponization of it, and it’s patriotic,” he said in a mocking tone. “They’re trolling us. His entire career is a troll.”
When asked by producers what he thought the fund would actually be used for, Stewart shouted, “Nothing!”
“They’re gonna give it to people that sprayed mace at police officers and pretend that they’re rewarding patriotism,” he lamented.
Stewart, who was instrumental in securing compensation protections for 9/11 first responders throughout the 2010s, was irate.
“You know how hard we fought to get 9/11 first responders some healthcare for the thing—and that was not much more—and these guys just drop it down,” he fumed.
“By the way, it’s not transparent. They don’t have to tell you where they’re doing it, how they’re deciding it, who’s getting the money. None of it,” he continued. “We’re in the Upside Down.”
Stewart remarked that the “nonsense” fund reminded him of a CVS “smash and grab,” where bystanders carelessly watch on as a “horde of teens” robs the place.
“The Trump administration is a smash and grab on the American public, on the taxpayer,” he said, describing Trump’s second presidency as the most “corrupt” and “utterly unsheathed” government ever “unleashed” on the U.S.
“And they’re just grabbing whatever they can and pretending it’s renumeration for some victimhood they faced that’s all fictitious,” he added. “It’s nonsense. Wild.”
Trump, himself a billionaire, defended the fund by shifting the focus to Biden’s administration, and said the $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars was merely “peanuts.”
“What they did in terms of weaponization will never be allowed to happen in this country again,” Trump said on Wednesday.
“We think that anybody involved in that process should partake, and you’re talking about peanuts compared to the value. It destroyed the lives of many, many people.”
