Former Daily Show host and your mom’s crush Jon Stewart trimmed his retirement beard for an interview with Charlie Rose on “CBS This Morning,” where he provided a rather calm and philosophical take on the results of the election.
“I don’t believe we are a fundamentally different country today than we were two weeks ago,” Stewart said. “The same country that elected Donald Trump elected Barack Obama. This election, to me is just another extension of the long argument that we’ve had from our founding, which is: What are we?”
Stewart also took a bat to the notion, evidently felt in Congress, that Trump’s win was a victory for Republicans—although it may well turn out to be:
“They’re not draining the swamp. McConnell and Ryan, those guys are the swamp. And what they decided to do is, I’m gonna make sure government doesn’t work, and then I’m going to use its lack of working as evidence of it. Donald Trump’s election is a reaction not just to Democrats but to Republicans. He’s not a Republican. He’s a repudiation of Republicans. But they will reap the benefit of his victory, in all of their cynicism.”
“One of the things that struck me as odd about this election, and maybe I just missed it, is nobody asked Donald Trump what makes America great,” Stewart noted. (Trump did, in an interview with the New York Times, point to the “late ‘40s and ‘50s” as a time when America was “not pushed around.”)
“What are the metrics? Because it seems like from listening to him, the metrics are that it’s a competition. And I think what many would say is what makes us great is [that] America is an anomaly in the world.” He warned against painting any group of people—from Muslim citizens to Trump supporters—“as a monolith.”
“This is the fight that we wage against ourselves and each other, because America is not natural. Natural is tribal. We’re fighting against thousands of years of human history to create something that no one’s ever—that’s what’s exceptional about America. This ain’t easy.”
Sure isn’t, Jon! Watch the full interview here.