Flailing Democratic lawmakers are hoping their constituents will do the heavy lifting of opposing Elon Musk, despite it being their job to save the government from the billionaire’s bedazzled chainsaw, comedian Jon Stewart said.
Responding to a listener who wanted to know what ordinary people can do to push back against the “department” of government efficiency’s cuts—particularly to the Veterans Affairs Administration—Stewart said he was frustrated that ordinary people are being forced to lead the charge in the first place.
“That’s the part that makes me so mad,” he said. “Our elected leaders there, we send them to Washington.” But every time “s--- hits the fan,” they look to their constituents to mobilize on their own.
“I liken it to if you’re at a basketball game and your team’s just getting the s--- kicked out of them, and in the timeout, the players just turn to the crowd and go, ‘Alright, you’re in!’” he said. “You’re like, ‘Wait, I don’t—but I don’t know how to play basketball.’ And they’re like, ‘I don’t care. We’re f---ing dying over here. Just get in there.”
In the two months since President Donald Trump took office, Musk’s DOGE has tried to shutter federal agencies, cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in federal contracts and purge the civil service. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, he appeared on stage wielding a bedazzled chainsaw as a metaphor for the havoc he was wreaking on the government.
“The fact that people are out there saying, ‘What can we do?’ says there’s a thirst for that leadership and for direction, and hopefully, it will be provided,” he said.
In the meantime, everyday Americans should focus on organizing “really targeted and really specific” actions—otherwise, their representatives won’t listen, Stewart added.
Earlier in the episode, he had observed that federal employees were being “portrayed [by Musk and Trump] as a criminal element. Like ‘You b-----ds testing our water for fecal matter! How dare you, sir?’”
He also worried that the tech leaders who have been cozying up to Trump in a bid to avoid regulation aren’t prepared to address the disruptiveness of the technologies they’re developing.
When he asked an artificial intelligence executive if, given the rapid pace of AI’s evolution, the executive was worried about society’s ability to manage the technology’s “collateral damage to jobs,” the guy replied, “No, I think we’ll be good,” Stewart said.
His guest, author and conservative analyst Sohab Ahmari, said today’s business and political leaders seemed to be trying to restructure the economy to concentrate economic power in ways not seen since the 1890s. And if they embrace 1890s power structures, they could face the same industrial relations of that era: mass strikes and violent uprisings.
“Everybody talks about the rules-based order, but what it feels a bit like is if you ever watched the show Peaky Blinders,” Stewart said, referring to a British period drama that follows a fictional version of a Birmingham-based street gang that was active from the 1880s to the 1920s.
Stewart explained that in the show, the Peaky Blinders gang leader, played by actor Thomas Shelby, had a theory about power called “big f--- small.”
“And it feels like we’re moving into the ‘big f--- small era’ [and] that big powers can take advantage,” Stewart said.
Government is the only thing big enough to limit corporate power, he added.
“If the government is not being exercised… with an eye towards the needs of the people, and it has been defanged for a more vengeance, exploitative version of it, where does that leave us?” he said.
