“The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart explained how former President Donald Trump is doing the U.S. “a service” by exploiting the country’s political system.
“You know how they 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 said on Thursday’s episode of his new Comedy Central podcast, “The Weekly Show.”
“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 and bolster those very institutions in a way that makes them much less fragile to these kinds of attacks?”
Jane Mayer, The New Yorker’s chief Washington correspondent, told Stewart that it’s “not really surprising” to see the 2024 presidential candidate go after the “barriers” that he’s previously faced in his political career.
“It’s the independent press — the very beginning he started by attacking the press. It’s the justice system, which of course we see him attacking every single day,” Mayer said.
“It’s the FBI, the CIA, the intelligence agencies — anything that has any independent information that could criticize him.”
But Stewart said he thinks the “more interesting conversation” isn’t about the former president’s “excesses and his exploitation.”
“[It has] more to do with, how do we turn the light on our own beautiful, flawed, confounding system and begin to rebuild it with more resilience and stability?” he said.
“This isn’t about criticizing Trump; this is about the constructive look at what is making this system so much more vulnerable.”