When President Joe Biden was given the chance to share his thoughts on Donald Trump’s guilty verdict over the weekend, not only did he stay silent, but he did so in an unnecessarily creepy way.
The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart started off his show on Monday by playing the footage of Biden slowly pausing as he heard the question before pausing the footage to channel how so many Democrats felt as they watched that moment in real time.
“No, don’t stop!” Stewart pleaded with him, incredulously wondering, “Why can’t they tell him to just fucking keep walking whenever he’s out in public?!”
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Stewart played the clip of Biden’s awkward smile, before remarking in a defeated tone, “Why does everything have to be so fucking weird? Why? If you have something to say about [Trump’s conviction], say it! If you don’t have something to say about it, don’t say it!”
The rest of Stewart’s monologue was focused on the media’s response to Trump’s guilty verdict, with Stewart zeroing in on Trump’s recent claim on Fox & Friends Weekend that he’s never said “Lock her up.” Although Jon Stewart was quick to point out that this was the famous rallying cry from his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, he was far more concerned with how none of the three Fox co-hosts pushed back on it.
“There’s three of them!” Stewart said. “One of them didn’t remember he said ‘lock her up,’ I can believe. Two of them didn’t remember? Three of them?! And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we need courts.”
Although Stewart was quick to acknowledge that there are many problems with America’s legal system, “especially for non-billionaire former presidents,” he commended the justice system for being the last place where politicians have to be careful about the things they say.
He showed a series of news clips demonstrating how both Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani’s public claims of election fraud in 2020 immediately fell apart the moment they or their lawyers were in court.
“The difference between in court and out of court is that, in court, someone can say ‘prove it,’” Stewart said. “And the problem is that most of the time in this country, our political leaders are not in court. They are here on TV, where the news media has decided that there’s really no such thing as reality.”
Stewart played a montage of cable news pundits declaring how America lives in “two different realities,” before responding, “No, you’re thinking of the multiverse. We are all living in one reality, and it can be the news media’s job to litigate the parameters of said reality. What the courts do really well is look backwards and reconstruct the realities of what happened. The news media could do the same, but what they do instead is look forward and wildly speculate on the future.”
This was followed by another montage of cable news journalists asking politicians about their hypothetical reactions to future events, like whether they’d accept the results of the 2024 election.
“Who fucking cares?” Stewart responded. “No one knows what the future holds. Ask this person what it was about the 2020 election that they found objectionable, and then litigate the realities of their objections to them, in front of them. So when they say to you, ‘I never said lock her up,’ you can say, ‘I object!’ Fucking do that!”
Stewart acknowledged that the media probably can’t help but indulge in speculative, horse race journalism at least a little bit, so he suggested they fit all that into one half-hour show called “No One Fucking Knows.”
“And then with the other 23 and a half hours in the day, the other seven days a week, you can present the evidence for our shared experience,” Stewart told the media. “Because court should be the option of last resort for our defined reality, not the only option for our defined reality.”
