"Rejecting Apathy: Jon Stewart Confronts Donald Trump's Demagoguery | Vanity Fair"

Jon Stewart was done. Sixteen years behind the anchor desk of The Daily Show had left him physically exhausted, creatively burned out, and eager to become reacquainted with his children. He left the show on a high note, with a star-studded final episode that featured a live performance by Bruce Springsteen and a sarcastic dig from Hillary Clinton. There was even a book (by me) detailing how Stewart had transformed a goofy basic cable show into influential political satire and how he had launched a wealth of comedic talent, including Steve Carell, Samantha Bee, Ed Helms, Jessica Williams, John Oliver, and Stephen Colbert. With Stewart’s exit in August 2015, his timing seemed perfect: The handoff to his successor, Trevor Noah, included a presidential contest between Clinton and Donald Trump, a matchup ripe for comedy. Stewart could ride off into the sunset, and the show and the country would be in good hands.

Things turned out fine for Noah, at least. Stewart, meanwhile, directed a movie (starring Carell) whose release was muted by the pandemic; he created a show for Apple TV+ that ended unhappily. Off-screen, however, Stewart had a significant impact, shaming Congress into funding health care for sick 9/11 first responders and for soldiers exposed to toxic burn pits. But 2023 ended with Comedy Central still searching for a successor to Noah, Stewart at large, and a high-stakes presidential election looming. Stewart returned to the Daily Show desk this February, though only on Monday nights.

He wasted no time stirring things up on his first show, skewering the advanced ages of Trump and, especially, President Joe Biden. Stewart also made a prediction: “The next nine months or so—and maybe more than that, depending on the coup schedule—they’re gonna suck.” He has not been wrong, with Sunday night’s ugly Trump rally at Madison Square Garden being only the latest low point. Paramount announced this week that Stewart will stay on as Monday host through December 2025. On election night, he will anchor a live show that begins at 11 p.m. and runs for one hour. He hopes to stay awake for its entirety. “Obviously, I’ll be kept in the hyperbaric chamber for most of the day,” Stewart says. “Maybe after a half hour, I’ll pull out a Murphy bed.”

Jon Stewart: Hey, man, what’s going down?

Vanity Fair: Plenty. You sound like you’re out and about.

Yeah, I’m driving to a gig. I’m on the road—because show business is a glamorous profession—on the road to Albany. So if I lose you, I’m a little bit in the mountains right now. I like to get out every month or so and do a weekend. And I like driving. So I’m doing Albany tonight, driving to Worcester tomorrow, and then driving home.

We’re talking 10 or so days before the election—

Is it 10? I haven’t been counting. It hasn’t really been on my radar.

What’s your primary emotion right now? Fear, dread, anger?

Yeah, I’d say on the sphinct-ometer, I’m nearly hermetically sealed. It’s very tense. I’m trying not to allow the circadian rhythm of Twitter and cable news to rule over my every waking moment. You know, checking the poll of polls and the state polls and the swing state polls. But it’s very hard, in a very kind of neurotic way, not to check every tent post of electoral divining.

Well, this is another reason that being on the road is a healthy thing.

I’ve said this, and many people have said it before me: When in doubt, head to Albany. It is your bridge over troubled waters.

The presidential race is crazy close. The problem, clearly, is that you should have pushed Joe Biden out sooner to give Kamala Harris more time to run a campaign.

So, no matter what, we can still come back and lay this on my doorstep?

Of course.

So I’m the Jill Stein of Ralph Naders?

No, you were on target about Biden’s age as an issue.

The whole idea when we first came back was, let’s plant our flag for the 2024 election. What’s the thing that’s most viscerally on our minds about the dynamic of the race? That was the genesis of the bit. You never know if it’s going to strike a chord. But in truth, it more struck an angry chord of people going, Why would you say such a thing?! What are you doing?! And our response is always, We were just saying what we’re seeing through our eye holes and hearing through our ear holes. So we said it through our mouth holes.

And then Biden’s disastrous debate performance leaves you feeling vindicated or depressed or what?

Well, certainly depressed on a human level, not on a political level. This is a person that I do have respect for and who was very helpful on some issues that I’ve been working through with some veterans groups and really liked. You know, he’s like one of those guys in your town—you go in and you have coffee, and there’s Frank at the table; he’s just holding court. Biden is the mayor of every town, who happened to be president. It’s tied up in not only political realities, but in human realities, in the familiar sense that all of our shows get canceled at some point.

The past month or so, during the episodes you host, Harris has been a minor presence, while there’s a lot of material about Trump. Is that because she’s boring or because he’s singularly dangerous?

Since 2015, he’s been—and no disrespect to him physically—the elephant in the room. She is still, by all intents and purposes, running a much more traditional campaign…I don’t know what to say other than, when one candidate spends 10 minutes on Arnold Palmer’s cock, it tends to crowd out everything else. And so you’ll do the thing about Harris and Liz Cheney, but the guy’s wearing an apron at a drive-thru window going, “Who knows if I’ll respect the results of the election?” There is a surreal quality to what you’re watching there that is, if nothing else, noteworthy. If you’re in a room with Air Supply and Kiss, you’re going to spend most of your time talking about Kiss.

Do you think Harris is doing an effective job of selling herself? Have you found her underwhelming?

I haven’t. But I’m not on the fence. The commentary becomes: The campaign is cynical—people want policy! Okay, here’s policy. Where’s the joy? And this policy, how are you going to pay for it? Meanwhile, Trump’s out there like, “I’ve got a concept of a plan. I’m going to pay for everything with tariffs. It’ll be the greatest!” Do I think they’re both playing in the same universe? I don’t. She, for some reason, has to be twice as good. Is she selling herself enough? It sounds like she’s got some reasonable plans in place. Sounds like she’s got smart people around her. It’s not a TV show—like, is her dramatic narrative enough? His arc is better: We’re being attacked by alien rape ships, and we have to gather together like in Independence Day. Is it real? Doesn’t feel like the country I experience.

You had Tim Walz on the show last week. What was your impression of him from sitting across the desk?

He smells like a loose-meat sandwich. I wasn’t surprised. He’s a human sloppy joe.

There’s an openness to him behind the scenes. Your first impression is that you’re meeting a human being, which is not always the case. Now, how much of that is, he’s there on a mission? But he did not seem artificial or contrived.

Next week 70 million-plus people are going to vote for Trump—

Let’s hope not more.

What’s your sense, on a percent basis, of how much of it is anti-government? How much of it is racist? How much of it is Trump as entertainment value?

Hold on. Let me get my pie chart. I’ve got these all calculated.

He’s a symptom of something. I think the biggest threat to democracy is a system that seems not to responsibly answer to the needs of, or to the perceived needs of, a lot of its people. The question is, what came first? And I think that lack of responsiveness probably came first. It’s that lack of responsiveness combined with an atmosphere that puts people on a far higher outrage platform than it used to. I think the algorithm and the rise of these social platforms that are incentivized to—look, they make their money the more you look at it, and nobody’s making money on, “Oh, that’s very reasonable! I think I’ll stay on YouTube forever!” It’s incentivized to profit from rabbit holes and from anger and outrage and weaponized actors looking to pervert the way we communicate. You combine that with a democracy that is analog by design and unresponsive due to a great deal of dysfunction, it would be malpractice for a demagogue not to take advantage. Down at the demagogue brunch, they’d be like, “What are you doing?!” It’s not hard for me to see the appeal of someone who walks in and goes, “You know, we’re all going to die unless I take over.”

If Trump wins, how do you think political media needs to change?

There’s a lot of people doing great work all the time. I still think the media doesn’t understand the way in which they have to prosecute the case for reality. Maria Ressa said a lie travels six times faster than the truth. Well, then the truth has to probably work fucking 15 times harder. And I think in some respects, the media has to work more as a symbiotic organism, in the way that weaponized media does. One thing that the right-wing media does really well is work together as a unit…The idea that we live in two different realities—no, we don’t. We live in reality. And if one side is going to distort it or weaponize it, it seems like the main function of journalism is not to present a counterpoint or present both sides; it is to litigate that shared reality to the best of their ability, and to do it relentlessly and in sync with each other.

How confident are you that that would happen covering a second Trump term?

I’m not confident that it would happen at all, no matter who’s there. I don’t think they view that as their mandate. I think they view coming up with high-minded slogans about their mandate as their mandate. Things like, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

During your first run at The Daily Show, it was not hard to understand your point of view on specific issues or politicians, even if the jokes were the priority. This time there’s still plenty of funny, yet it feels as if you’re laying your opinions on the line more directly. Is that something you came in knowing you wanted to do?

Aging brings a great deal of atrophy, whether it’s muscle or vigor. But the other thing that atrophies, I think at times, is subtlety. I’m not doing the show every day, so maybe that has something to do with the directness of it. And you probably don’t have the patience to surround it with as much adornment. You kind of lose that ability to paint with a really fine brush, the one you hope people will admire your artwork [for]: “My God, this must have taken hours!” Now you’re just like, If I don’t yell this out now, I think I might have a heart attack.

Do you watch John Oliver’s show? Or Stephen Colbert’s?

I, unfortunately, do not get much of a chance because of how much Breaking Bad and Only Murders in the Building I have to catch up on.

One thing that’s different from your last time around is that now those guys are your competition.

Are they? We all do what we do. Hopefully we find an audience. It’s not the Olympics of funniness. I operate a small, artisanal [static]—

Jon? You broke up there. You were saying, “a small, artisanal” something.

Talk-shittery.

Glad I clarified that.

Yeah, you’re gonna want every level of sophistication and nuance I was bringing to bear.

[I followed up with Stewart back in New Jersey when he was stationary, after Paramount announced that he would stay on as host.] Okay, it’s now seven days until the election, and yesterday you announced you will be staying at The Daily Show through December 2025. Why?

It’s been fun. I really like the people I work with. They’re incredibly smart. They’re good people…The reason for coming back [this year] wasn’t like, I’m going to make a last-ditch effort to get the electoral result I want!

How much of it is you wanting to be part of the conversation next year, regardless of who wins the election?

I have a lot of different outlets, whether it’s stand-up or writing or podcasting. I don’t think, Oh, something will happen and I must be on Comedy Central! I don’t have any illusions about what it means in the larger context. I like making things.

Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden provided a wealth of possible material for the show. You went deep on his deportation plans. Why focus there?

If there’s a core tenet of what they’re doing, it’s pointing to migrants as the cause of our dystopian present. And rather than work towards what is, I think, a pretty achievable, not-that-complicated idea of fixing an immigration system, they’ve decided to go a slightly different route, which is: “I’m going to take an amount of people that I don’t know the number of and force them to leave.” Rather than using a big boy approach and sitting down and rolling up your sleeves, this is what he does: Build a wall. Drill, baby, drill. Like, he’s a bumper sticker guy. Deport them all. Okay—what’s that going to look like? Basically, it’s going to be stop-and-frisk for all of America. And it’s appalling. There is a way to protect the sovereignty of the nation and yet still treat everyone as humans. There seems to be no attempt to balance that because that’s not good demagoguing.

The media is focused on the terrible jokes that were made. Focus on Trump, who would have the power. Focus on the guy going, “I’m going to deport everybody using the law we used to intern Japanese people.”

As part of that Daily Show bit, Jessica Williams delivered a real rallying cry about voters not becoming numb to, or distracted by, Trump’s bullshit.

We’re all feeling this. It’s exhausting. But at this point, fuck apathy.

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