As far as Jon Stewart is concerned, the days of “when they go low, we go high” are long gone. In a new episode of The Daily Show, the veteran host urges Democrats to “fight like Republicans” as we head into another Donald Trump presidency.
“It has been two weeks since the election. Feels like two months,” Stewart said to the Daily Show audience on Monday evening. “It’s been 15 years since the election.” But despite the bleakness of the news cycle ever since Trump won reelection, Stewart urged the Democrats to stay as engaged in the fight against Trump and as they were preelection rather than patting themselves on the back for perceived wins. Stewart then cut to Democratic leaders like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Representative Dan Goldman, and Representative Pramila Jayapal who have been searching for the silver lining in various media interviews, touting how Dems flipped three House seats and “gained back almost all of those that we had lost in 2022.”
“Almost is doing a lot of work in that sentence,” Stewart noted. He homed in on the “load-bearing adverb” via a darkly comic analogy: “Parents, good news. We gained back almost all the children we lost on the field trip.”
Stewart’s ultimate message to Democrats was clear: It’s time to start playing ball like the Republicans. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again,” Stewart said. “Republicans are playing chess, and the Democrats are in the nurse’s office because they glued their balls to their thigh.” He called out Democrats for playing by the rules while Republicans continue to exploit legislative loopholes. “That is our government in a nutshell: The rules say, ‘We can stop it.’ The loophole says, ‘Fuck that.’ And so what are you left with? The last refuge of losers: the norms.”
He ended his missive with an oblique reference to the January 6 insurrection as an example of the other side not necessarily playing by any set standards or rules. “You guys be the loophole guys that figure out how to get shit done because [Republicans] don’t give a fuck about your norms,” he said. “They will exploit any loophole—even if they have to go through clearly closed windows to do it.”
