Jon Stewart is furious at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for caving in on the GOP’s controversial funding bill.
After playing some footage of Schumer saying that Republicans didn’t have enough votes to pass the bill, Stewart played an ABC News clip explaining how Schumer himself decided to vote for it.
“What the f--- happened?!” Stewart asked in his monologue Monday.
The Daily Show host later jokingly added, “[Schumer] probably got a little something out of this... [He] wouldn’t have given up that powerful leverage on the budget for nothing. My guess is Chucky got some cheese.”
He played an MSNBC clip covering how Schumer got nothing in exchange for his support for the bill.
“Senator Schumer, no disrespect, but you are a disgrace to Jewish stereotypes about financial negotiations,” Stewart joked. “That’s just, I thought the whole point of us is that’s what we do.”
Stewart ripped into Schumer’s explanation for working with Republicans, which was that he planned to “keep at it” until Trump’s approval rating dropped far enough that Republican congressmen would reach across the aisle.
“You’re going to keep at it?” Stewart mocked. “At what?”
“This was it!” Stewart said. “This was the ‘it’ that you would have been keeping at... Don’t you have to start it to keep at it? If this wasn’t it, then what is it if this not be it?”
Stewart pointed out that the Democratic Party’s approval rating is down to 27 percent, significantly lower than Trump’s at the moment.
“You’ve got to get Trump to lose 8 points of popularity just for you to get to the point where you’re 13 points below him,” Stewart told Democrats. “Your approval is only 7 points above where it turns red and goes into low power mode.”
Stewart argued that Schumer’s approach to governing within a second Trump administration was delusional at best:
“There is a persistent fiction within the Democratic Party that if they just hang out with Republicans in the gym, or wait out Trump’s popularity, or give them concessions on a continuing resolution they said would harm the country, that Republicans will finally see the light,” Stewart said.
He argued that Schumer pretends the GOP is more reasonable than they are, because doing so “excuses you from having to propose an alternative, coherent vision.”
Stewart concluded to Schumer that this excuse “allows you to pretend that this is just an issue of messaging, and not merit.”
