Jon Stewart summed up Donald Trump’s decisive win as “America Presents: The S--tshow,” on his Weekly Show podcast on Friday, declaring, “F--- us. F--- me. I was wrong.”
Trump’s first White House win was a “gut punch,” Stewart said, but this time felt very different. After Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, “It felt like such a fait accompli that the Democrats were gonna win, you were gonna feel good about it, there were things that maybe you weren’t gonna like policy-wise, but you felt good,” he explained, “So it felt like an anomaly. This feels different because it is a democratic victory.”
When Trump won the first time, he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million, but in his win over Harris, he gained more voter support, winning the popular vote by four million. Stewart said this was the one outcome no one was “prepared for.”
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“Each one of those scenarios, it was, ‘How is Donald Trump going to finagle his way back into the White House? How is he going to use undemocratic principles? What measure of intimidation and underhanded shenaniganery will this man use to worm his way back into the Oval Office?’ And it turned out, he used our electoral system as it is designed.”
Stewart railed against the Democrats’ argument that the supposedly close race was looking good for Harris because of their “vaunted ground game.”
“By the way, I don‘t ever in my life wanna hear about, ‘Our vaunted ground game will put us over the top. It’s a 50-50 toss up race, we’re sure of it, but the vaunted ground game,’“ he said. ”Turns out that people knocking on other people’s doors doesn’t get them to do what you want them to do—as I believe vacuum and bible salesmen probably have known for many many centuries.”
Stewart ended his opening remarks on the show by making an analogy between his election “vertigo,” and how he quit alcohol.
“I’d love to sit back and think about the autopsy and where you move from there, but I think I still feel as though I’m in that moment of vertigo to some extent,” he said. “In the same way that I, when I decided to stop drinking I didn’t do it while the room was still spinning. I didn’t stop doing booze and drugs in that moment of lying on the floor facedown trying to wonder if I just move my hand here, will the room stop. And I think that’s a wise way of looking at it.”
In sum, he said, he’s taking a beat to let himself react to the results. “I think you have to be more clear-eyed, have your balance, and your feet underneath you before you can start really thinking about what it was that made what you think your worldview is, and the things that you were certain about, not certain.”
