The Daily Show host Jon Stewart wasn’t impressed with the revelation that Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski met with President-elect Donald Trump on Monday.
Brzezinski said during the announcement, “For those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, why wouldn’t we?”
Stewart responded, “Uh, because you said he was Hitler.”
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Responding to a clip where Scarborough listed all the issues they talked with Trump about, Stewart mocked, “Oh, I bet you really laid down the gauntlet, Joe. I bet you walked in there and just let him have it, didn’t you?”
Stewart used the Morning Joe segment to segue into his larger point of the monologue: that Democrats have “learned nothing” from the past eight years dealing with Trump’s Republican party.
“Republicans are playing chess and the Democrats are in the nurse’s office because they glued their balls to their thighs,” Stewart said.
He explained, “Government is theoretically a constitutional system of checks and balances between equally powerful branches. But what government actually is is an overly complicated Byzantine bureaucratic maze of rules, loopholes to those rules, and norms.”
Stewart argued that Republicans have long been ignoring the norms, happily abusing loopholes with zero regard for any apparent hypocrisy their political opponents may point out.
Stewart traced this pattern back from when Republicans withheld their vote for Obama’s 2016 Supreme Court justice pick, to the current situation where Trump may bypass the usual confirmation process for his controversial Cabinet picks.
“That is our government in a nutshell. The rules say, ‘We can stop it,’ the loophole says, ‘F--k that.’ And so what are you left with? The last refuge of losers: the norms,” Stewart said.
Stewart advised the Democratic party, “Look, let this show be the utterly ineffective hypocrisy finders. I can tell you from experience, it does nothing. You guys be the loophole guys that figure out how to get s--t done, because [Republicans] don’t give a f--k about your norms.”
