Decision 2024: As Jon Stewart Returns to the Daily Show, A Refresher Course and A Wish List

 

In one of Jon Stewart’s final episodes of The Daily Show in July of 2015,  he and Jordan Klapper dealt with Trump’s announcement for the Presidency by arguing how significant it would be if he became President. The gag was if Trump won, he would become the first ‘asshole’ ever elected President.

Klapper argued that Stewart was anti- and Stewart said that ‘some of my best friends are a—holes.” He named Paul Rudd. Klapper said that wasn’t true, Rudd (who was about to be interviewed) walked on next to Klapper and said deadpan: “I saw your father (bleep) your mother. Trump 2016” and walked off. Klapper acknowledged he’d been wrong. Stewart argued that there had been asshole presidents before and the debate ended with Stewart mentioned Nixon. Klapper acknowledged that Nixon was an asshole, but a closeted one. “Trump would be the first asshole who acknowledged his identity.” Klapper said.

I’m not just saying this to remind everyone that Stewart, like so many other people in news, underestimated Trump. I need to make this clear because The Daily Show had endorsed Trump for the Presidency – in 2012. Lewis Black had spoken about it heavily in one of his ‘Back in Black’ segments and when Trump said he was thinking about holding a debate, not only was Stewart thrilled about the idea, he showed footage that made it clear in 2011 just how horrible a person Trump was. And when Trump said he was considering running for President that year, Stewart cut to the famous footage from Apollo 13 of Mission Control applauding.

When I heard that Jon Stewart was returning to host The Daily Show on Mondays, starting this week, I won’t deny I was thrilled and delighted. Stewart is the kind of entertainer America needs more than ever during an election year. But whereas the left is overjoyed because of what Stewart represents to them, I think we need Stewart’s presence for another reason.

Now I wrote in an earlier article that I was one of Jon Stewart’s biggest fans when he was hosting the Daily Show. I watched the first episode he hosted in January of 1999, which dealt with Clinton’s impeachment and the last episode he did just prior to the first Republican Debate in 2015 and I think I missed only a handful in between. I watched him through Indecision 2000 (a branding that eventually Stewart said: “We had no idea you would take this and run with it) in the aftermath of 9-11, the leadup to the Iraq invasion which became referred to by the show as MESS-O-POTAMIA, four different Presidential elections, the financial crisis, Bin Laden’s assassination, the Tea Party and everything that happened up until 2015. I was personally going through some dark times through much of the first decade of Stewart’s tenure but he and his team could always make me laugh even when things were miserable for me and the country.

I’ll admit that, for much of the period, I did follow it for news purposes as much as anything but not once did I ever take its label “The Most Trusted Name In News” seriously. I knew that Stewart was entertaining more than he was informing and that he was one of the greatest satirists of all time. His work inspired a whole generation of similar comics, many of whom started their careers on The Daily Show. Stephen Colbert and John Oliver are the most successful, but Wyatt Cenac and Samantha Bee had brilliant comedy series for long periods and Steve Carell, Al Madrigal, Jason Jones, Ed Helms, Aasaf Mandvi, Jessica Williams and John Hodgman all launched successful careers under his mantel. I knew that this was here to make me laugh first.

But I also knew very clearly the targets of Stewart’s rath. The first was attacking partisan politics. Even before the rise of Trump, before Citizens United, Stewart could see just how far out the Republican Party was becoming. Much of his energy was spent on the Republicans obsession with the Iraq War, the way the Party spent every primary pivoting to its extremist and then moving back to the center for the general. He spent a lot of time antagonizing John McCain and Mitt Romney – Republicans now considered sainted by so many today – as panderers to their base doing anything they could to win the Republican nomination. When McCain railed against the Tea Party, he berated this as hypocrisy for his choice of Sarah Palin as his Vice President in 2008. When Michael Steele was elected chairman of the RNC in the wake of Obama’s election, Steele was parodied by a Sesame Street Muppet. (Eventually he interviewed Steele after he was fired.) He went out of his way to ridicule the extremists such as Herman Cain and Michelle Bachman, utterly tore apart Newt Gingrich and loved it when Rick Perry and Rick Santorum had their moments of ridicule in the 2012 race.

But he also went out of his way during this period to do everything in his power to show that Democrats were incompetent and easily cowed. After the 2002 midterms, he said that the Democratic Party was dead. He mocked the idea of John Kerry as a Presidential candidate, even after he got the nomination. And he never was won over by the idea that so many voters had that Barack Obama was a savior. Yes he was angry that the GOP had wanted him to fail and questioned his citizenship but he had no illusions about Obama’s ability to manage legislation as early as the spring of 2009. Stewart’s politics were that of a Democrat, but he had no illusions as to the flaws of the party and he pointed them out on every opportunity possible.

The bigger target of his wrath was, of course, cable news. And despite the rose colored glasses, he thought all cable news was ruining our political discourse. Yes he went out of his way to rail as Fox News referring to it over and over as ‘Turd Mountain’ and he pointed out with great relish every single mistake they made. But he was just as relentless about the punditry that existed everywhere on every single network, particularly MSNBC and CNN. Over and over he mocked their inability to focus on present and to always focus on the next election and who might be the next President. He pointed out that they were almost always wrong with their predictions – and that they never suffered any consequences for it. Most people who are that wrong at their jobs would have been fired years ago, but the same pundits who were working twenty years ago are still working today with little sign of recognition of their failures.

He was, if anything, willing to give credit to Fox News when they did something right. He might have hated Bill O’Reilly, but there was clearly some respect. At one point he referred to him as the Hulk: “Usually he’s a monster but point him in the right direction and he becomes a hero.” He didn’t feel that way about all Fox News broadcasters (he had much disdain for Glenn Beck) but he was willing to acknowledge every so often that the Lou Dobbs of the world were right. The left never does that now; I don’t see any media sources doing that, and if they do, it’s only with disdain.

And he spent more energy berating CNN – indeed all 24 hour news networks – for failing at their jobs. He was painfully aware of how much the media was focused on scandal and would just as soon leave stories at the point there might be news, let alone acknowledge their own failings.  Most of his tenure was spent ridiculing how all cable news was failing and that they were doing a horrible job informing the public.

And as we all know the targets of his satire – politicians and reporters – did not take this as the warning was intended to be. Instead, they seemed to enjoy being in on the joke. They loved appearing on Stewart’s show, they loved using clips of his show for entertainment purposes to propel their own messages. Fox News said he was clueless, MSNBC said he spoke truth to power, CNN loved being part of it, none of them got the message. Jon Stewart spent fifteen years telling the world to beware the political media industrial complex. And just like when Eisenhower gave his famous warning before leaving office, we all ignored it.

But as we know when it comes to assessing what’s wrong with the system, everybody will do anything but look in a mirror. When Jon Stewart came back to TV with The Problem With Jon Stewart,  younger reviewers and certain identity groups chose to blame him for the mess America was in. Identity groups blamed him for creating Tucker Carlson after the notorious Crossfire incident (ignoring that again he was blaming the media for creating the problem) that he was too centrist and compassionate towards the right wing when he had spent his entire career being bipartisan in his satirical attacks,  and for still trying to see both sides of an issue when both sides refuse to listen to the other.

Now, with both Comedy Central and The Daily Show in a crisis Stewart has returned to it in an election year. This is welcomed with great joy by entertainers and of course left-wingers who think, in the same way that Taylor Swift can influence elections, Stewart can keep Trump out of the White House. Stewart, of all people, knows he does not have that power.

I look forward to Stewart’s return to The Daily Show and I wonder what he will do this year. What I hope he’ll do is show the fearlessness he did in his first fifteen years on the show. And that means that he will use his comedy to speak truth to power – all power.

I don’t know if, a decade later, Stewart still has the ability to draw in the kind of names that he used too. Considering he was able to do so on The Problem, I think that’s possible. Whether they’ll show up is another question but here goes.

I want him to ask Josh Hawley or Marco Rubio how they can support for President a man who spoke at a rally where the supporters tried to have them killed. I want him to ask, how after barely surviving it, they could return to their seats and just keep doing what they had been doing originally. I want him to ask Lauren Boebert why she didn’t want McCarthy to be Speaker and why she voted to remove him. I want him to ask Roma McDaniel why she forsook her uncle for a man who cast her aside when she became an inconvenience to him. I’d like him to talk to Alina Habbas and ask whether she believes the arguments she says in court.

I want him to ask AOC that, if she truly supports social change in America, why she is supportive of a group of fundamentalists who believe many of the people’s right she embraces have no right to exist. I want him to ask Ilhan Omar and Rashida Taib if they believe Hamas actions’ were justifiable. I want him to ask Bernie Sanders that if he had been elected President how he would have carried out his platform.

I want him to ask George Santos what he was thinking when he ran for office. I want him to ask Robert F. Kennedy Jr if he thinks his family proud of him. I want him to ask Liz Cheney why she went along with Trump for as long as she did. I want him to ask  I want him to ask Hakeem Jeffries why he let his caucus vote McCarthy out of the Speakership when the procedural vote was called. I want him to ask Claudine Gay why she couldn’t give a simple answer to the easiest question possible. I want him to ask Chuck Schumer if he thinks the Republican Party is loyal to America. I want him to ask Mike Johnson if he thinks the Democrats are.

And I want him to ask of any  who was working for one of the cable media networks during the ten years he was off the Daily Show and has since retired from the profession if they have learned anything from what he was trying to tell them for fifteen years about how badly they were failing at their jobs right up until the moment he left. And if they tell him he was wrong about Donald Trump to, I want him to give the only answer he has to: “I was never a journalist. I’m only an entertainer. What’s your excuse?”

Whether any of them will give an answer remotely resembling honesty is impossible to say. But Stewart has often been able to get answers that reporters weren’t and even if he doesn’t, it will be entertaining to watch them squirm in a way that it just isn’t anywhere else.