Comedian and Daily Show host Jon Stewart questioned whether former President Donald Trump is “exposing at some level a reality of crony capitalism, a reality of transactional corruption that is the heartbeat of corporate and political America.”
During the first episode of Stewart’s new podcast, The Weekly Show, from Comedy Central, Stewart spoke to Jane Mayer, a staff writer with the New Yorker magazine, and Noah Bookbinder, the president of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
While speaking with Mayer and Bookbinder, Stewart questioned if Trump was “exposing a reality” of “crony capitalism” and “transactional corruption” within “corporate and political America.” The former president was recently found guilty of 34 charges of falsifying business records in the first degree related to payments made to adult entertainment star, Stormy Daniels, during the 2016 presidential election.
“Is he exposing a reality? I’m not saying he’s not pushing the limit of it,” Stewart said. “I’m not saying he’s not exploiting it, but isn’t he exposing at some level a reality of crony capitalism, a reality of transactional corruption that is the heartbeat of corporate and political America.”
Stewart went on to speak about how Trump had “pushed for” Georgia Secretary of State Bryan Raffensperger to “find him 11,000 votes,” and how while serving as president, Trump had “pushed Ukraine” to investigate President Joe Biden in 2019.
“What I’ve seen is the money has become bigger and bigger and bigger, and it is corrupting the government but it wasn’t always this way,” Mayer said during the podcast. “It’s not the whole story. There are incredible numbers of people in Washington who are really dedicated to doing the right thing for the right reasons, both Republicans and Democrats. They’re just, they’re interested in policy, they’re interested in serving the country. And, he’s really bad-mouthing that whole possibility.”
In the aftermath of Trump’s guilty verdict, the former president blasted Biden and labeled the verdict as being a “rigged decision” that was meant to “hurt” a political opponent.
As Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw Trump’s business records trial, has donated to Biden. This is a violation of judicial ethics rules.
“He’s identifying though, a dissatisfaction, and two things can be true. One is there are a lot of really good, dedicated policy people and good-hearted with great integrity people working in Washington every day to make the country work better,” Stewart continued. “And, number two is the system is so removed from the needs of its people and so insulated and isolated within the Beltway and within that very peculiar system within the Beltway, that it can’t actually accomplish the goal even those good-hearted people of integrity want it to.”
Stewart then added, “in some ways” Trump “is doing us a service” similar to how companies will “employ a white hat hacker who will go into a system and find its vulnerabilities.”
“Now he’s not doing it for our benefit, he’s doing it to exploit it,” Stewart added. “But what I’m saying is, what if we take the information that he’s delivering us which is, here are the vulnerabilities in your system that I can exploit, can’t we reverse engineer that?”
While appearing as a guest on comedian Tom Segura’s podcast, Stewart described the system as being “rigged,” adding that someone “can be right about a diagnosis and wrong about the remedy.”
