Now that we’ve picked ourselves up off of the collective floor and tossed out the millions of bottles of wine consumed in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s win last week, the time has come to start figuring out how the hell we got ourselves into this mess. And, as Americans (at least the left-leaning ones) tend to do in times of crisis, we’re turning to Jon Stewart for answers.
Stewart, who is supposedly retired but also out promoting his new oral history of The Daily Show, appeared on CBS This Morning to give Charlie Rose his take on the situation. For his part, Stewart wasn’t one of those who was shellshocked by Trump’s win. “It all ties together,” he says, adding that Trump ”is not a Republican — he’s a repudiation of Republicanism,” Stewart said. “But they will reap the benefits of his victory, in all of their cynicism.”
“McConnell and Ryan, those guys are the swamp,” Stewart says. “And what they decided to do was, ‘I’m going to make sure government doesn’t work, and make its lack of working as evidence of it.’”
Stewart is also of the opinion that liberals are in equally dire need of some self-reflection, pointing out that, “I thought Donald Trump disqualified himself at numerous points, but there is now this idea that anyone who voted for him has to be defined by the worst of his rhetoric … In the liberal community, you hate this idea of creating people as a monolith. Don’t look at Muslims as a monolith. They are the individuals and it would be ignorance. But everybody who voted for Trump is a monolith, is a racist. That hypocrisy is also real in our country.”
You can watch a clip of Stewart’s sit-down with Charlie Rose below.