Jon Stewart on the Perilous State of Late Night and Why America Fell for Donald Trump

0:02This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In September, right after Jimmy Kimmel was suspended from his late-night talk show, Jon Stewart went on the air with a special episode of The Daily Show. From Comedy Central, it's the all-new government-approved Daily Show with your patriotically obedient host, Jon Stewart. The joke, of course, was that they'd done a full rebranding and the high style of MAGA was on display. Flags flying, jet fighters soaring, the studio slathered in gold, and the desk is gigantic.

0:47Stewart, in a red tie, looks like he's going to lose his lunch. We have another fun, hilarious, administration-compliant show. he's so anxious he's actually twitching coming to you tonight from a real shithole the crime-ridden cesspool that is new york city it is a tremendous disaster like no one's ever seen before someone's national guard should invade this place am i right

1:24That night was a real reminder of why after 25 years plus, we still very much need Jon Stewart on the air. But compared to his early years on the show, the era of George W. Bush, this is a much more dangerous time for late night and for speech and for America. Kimmel nearly lost his job over a remark about MAGA in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder. The head of the FCC threatens broadcasters in a tone that sometimes sounds a lot like a mob boss. This administration supports free speech only insofar as it agrees with that speech. And Stewart is not too far from the hot seat himself. Comedy Central is now controlled by David Ellison, the Trump-friendly CEO of Paramount Skydance.

2:10So I sat down to hash this all out the other day with Jon Stewart at the New Yorker Festival. Hello. John Stewart. How are you? I love it. I am so pleased to have John Stewart here. Me too. I'm delighted. This is a man of New Jersey. Can I hear it for the people? That's it? That's it? That's the appropriate level of respect. A few cheers, a couple of boos, most people indifferent. I understand. I've lived there. I want to begin by reminding you of what happened not long ago when Jimmy Kimmel was tossed off the air. You had to come up with a response to something very serious. And I want to know if you, and by the way, you weren't alone.

3:10Colbert also did, John Oliver also. So was there any sense of coordination or conversation in how you would do this? No, we don't even, I don't even have their numbers. I don't know. No, we do have a text chain that goes along. I think everybody, look, we all understand it's a luxury. None of us are owed a platform or any of those things. But we also understand that it's a meaningful luxury and that there is a certain amount of strength of a society that is able to withstand the smallest of ridicule. and when that goes away when the leadership becomes you know the last time that that happened was uh i have a friend who did a show very similar to mine in egypt and he was exiled and in america we sort of assumed that satire was settled law and uh to find out that it along with dobs were going to be revisiting what we considered stare decisis uh you know it's i think it rattled everyone to some extent, but it also presented great opportunity.

4:12And so I don't know that we've had as much fun as we did that Thursday morning coming up with all the stupid little shit that you see with, I mean, including like gold pictures and red ties and, you know, it, it gave us some purpose. That being said, like, I want to be clear. I don't, the victims of this administration are not the comedians. Like, we are a visible manifestation of certain things, but the victims are the victims, are the people that are struggling to have any voice and are being forcibly removed from streets by, you know, hooded agents. You know, those are the victims of this administration.

4:57You say that this is not the issue, but I, look, I remember when Putin came to power and 2000? Sure. The first thing he did was take a program that was a satirical program about politics called Kukli puppets off the air. And people said, oh, I took the puppets off the air. Within a couple of weeks, the news was off the air. Isn't it possible that this assault, however kind of herky-jerky and back and forth it might be, is tantamount to something else? When 7 million people show up in America on a weekend for anything, I mean, honestly, anything, you know something's going on. And this is, they are attempting to graft, I think, an alien culture onto this country.

5:52We're not Russia and their history of autocracy or dictatorship or those things. That doesn't mean we're not going to be in some kind of soft autocracy where news is controlled. But we have a lot of different avenues. And suppression creates opportunity. And a populace that is thirsty for inspiration and leadership and morality and integrity and lack of corruption, that's fertile ground for that opportunity. so like as bad as this is and it's fucking bad like i knew it would be bad i did not it was think it was gonna be like flesh eating dick cancer bad like i that's that's an i yeah you know how bad it is david ellison that's my new boss paramount yes and not only does he forgive me own your enterprise, he could also affect it.

6:57And he just hired Barry West to run CBS News. So tell me what this means. Well, I wish you would mention that before I went into the dick cancer bed. This is not happenstance. This began with Richard Vigery doing a mail-in to try and get people to be conservative. This began with people buying AM radio stations and converting them to conservative talk radio. This began with Roger Ailes and the Nixon White House going, we will never allow this to happen to a Republican politician again. All of the institutions by which I mean education and media and news and academia and all those things that we relied on as a solid tent post by which to build a decent society on, they were like, yeah, no.

7:49And they built a parallel universe of think tanks and education and media. And so that they could at some point just flip a switch and move us over onto that track. Because what do these institutions have? They are the reference point for our decisions. What do you do? You quote, well, there's a study done by, and you use data and scientific method and other things to try and make as informed a decision as you can. But if you're a political movement that believes that investing those institutions with authority is against your movement, the best thing you can do is build organizations that either tear down the credibility of those institutions or you build your own.

8:41But with respect, John, this is different. This is markedly different. It's one thing to have stages of the plan. The Brookings Institution that was kind of liberal, and then you have the rise of the American Enterprise Institute. It's one thing to have a liberal newspaper and then a conservative newspaper. Fine. Fine. In fact, all the better in some ways. But this is, what's going on now is different, and with respect, you're going to face it potentially with Paramount and The Daily Show. Sure. What do you do? you you don't compromise on what you do and you do it till they tell you to leave that's all you can do that's that's all you can do so i think the line that you gave before was i'm not giving in i'm not going anywhere i think i'm i'm neurotic still i'm not you know Your contract comes up in December.

9:40You're going to sign another one? I mean, we're working on staying. Look, the other thing to remember is it's not as clear cut as all that. In other words, if it's up to you, you're staying. Oh, yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's up to me.

9:59How do you think CBS News will be affected? Does evening news even matter at this point? I don't know. In the media sphere that we live in? We are projecting things that we do not know. The ecosystem has changed. The monetization of it has changed. I will tell you this, it is a different ethos. But one thing we have to remember, and this is the hardest truth for us to get at, is that the institutions that we spoke about earlier have problems. They do. And if we don't address those problems in a forthright way, then those institutions become vulnerable to this kind of assault. Credibility is not something that was just taken.

10:37it was also lost. And that is a part of this equation that has to be considered. And the Democrats have to consider that as well. There's a reason Donald Trump came to power. And that is that in the general populist mind, government no longer serves the interests of the people it purports to represent. That's a broad-based, deep feeling. And that helps when someone comes along, he goes, the system is rigged. And people go, yeah, it is rigged. Now, he's a good diagnostician. I don't particularly care for his remedy. Tell me why you think Trump won. Because of that, because of the dissatisfaction of an analog system in a digital world.

11:20The distance between how you feel about the world and the world has never been larger. We are victims of the circadian rhythms of social media. So, and social media is incentivized to what? Not connect us, not, and I've seen the Facebook commercial and yes, it's true. If you do like a certain kind of cat, there will be other people that like that certain kind of cat and you will connect with each other. But the purpose of social media is to keep you on its platform. That's it. They want you on that platform. They want you on there as long as they could possibly have you. And the way that they have rigged our brains to figure it out is that outrage and anger and hate and hostility are much stronger drivers of engagement than anything else.

12:05Now, on the flip side of that, we have a political system designed in the 18, what? It's designed as an analog. What is the Senate? It's the cooling saucer of democracy. And what's Twitter, the thing that makes you want to rip people's eyes out. And you put those together and it's not a good mix. And so he was able to harness the anger and catastrophizing of that as a way of taking over that other thing that we have. And you didn't find Joe Biden and Kamala Harris a good remedy for that in the election? that was called to set up line i thought they were great look what's going on with mandani you know you got you finally got a guy in new york city who is getting people to vote in the affirmative for his positions who is inspiring people and giving a certain amount of leadership and what is the general status quo of the democratic party do with that.

13:14This guy is a communist. Like they go along with the caricature of this man. Look, we're in a bad situation, but it's not just Trump. It's the passivity of the Democratic Party to stick with a status quo that most people felt was not working. in January about a week after uh Trump was inaugurated uh you did a monologue on the daily show that it it was god knows it was critical of Trump but you didn't go after him so much as you went after a lot of his critics or at least the more hypocritical and pearl clutching ones you seem to be saying that instead of crying wolf calling him a fascist for every executive order was to his benefit.

14:07I agree. Do you think you underestimated how bad this would get? No, I stand by it because in that moment, that's how I felt. What I'm saying is the seeds of this destruction were not sown this year. They were sown by Citizens United. They were sown by Corporations Are People. They were sown by a Democratic Party that thinks it's okay for their Senate to be an assisted living facility. Like, respectfully, like, I mean, I could kick the shit out of the Senate.

14:52I don't mean this cynically. I mean this idealistically. I mean this as like, we better get real about this very fast. And it's coming from a perspective of having worked with our government to try and get certain things done. I was stunned by certain Republicans that would tweet out, never forget the heroes of 9-11, versus how they would vote for their medical care. But I was also stunned by the Democratic Party leadership's passivity and being told over and over again, no, no, no, you have to go through regular order. When we have this congressional hearing, I don't want you to be confrontational.

15:33You have to be nice. And then what we hopefully will get to do is put the first responders and the victims of 9-11, we'll be able to put their health care into the transportation bill. Unless Mitch McConnell thinks he wants to trade that for the import-export tax that he really wants on petroleum. And I would go, that's crazy. And so this is coming from a place of, I've lived with this. Well, we're in the middle of a government shutdown, which is a different attitude this time than it was the last time. That's right. Does that make Chuck Schumer any braver now than he was before? No. And you can tell about like what Chuck Schumer has been told is you're losing and people like your glasses to be higher up on your nose.

16:18And so it's what I'm telling you is here's what they're doing with us now. The strategy is authenticity. And suddenly, people in Congress are cursing. Oh, and it seems so natural. When Chuck Schumer curses,

16:40this is a shitty bill.

16:49I'm over it all, man. I'm over it all. And I understand why people wanted to blow it up and why it's so vulnerable to being taken over by a charismatic person that says, I understand how this is done. Like even the shutdown, which I'm glad that they stood up for something, but I still think the ACA is playing the Republican in the corporate game. It's basically just subsidies to insurance companies when what we need is healthcare. And the ACA doesn't give you healthcare. It gives you subsidies to get a coupon that maybe you can take to someone that then they'll give it to you and then there'll still be a deductible.

17:2940 % of people in this country go without things like food because of their medical debt. And so like when the Democrats announce that they got the pharmaceutical companies to out of the grace of their heart, allow us to negotiate the price on 10 different medicines, only 10 and that's a victory when we're subsidizing these motherfuckers by billions of dollars a year? No, no more. I'm done with it.

18:04I'm speaking with Jon Stewart, the comedian, actor, and host of The Daily Show. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

18:29This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm speaking today with Jon Stewart. Stewart was hardly the first political comedian on TV, but on The Daily Show, he pioneered something new. He delivered some of the sharpest political analysis on television, interviewing serious newsmakers in a format that was also consistently hilarious. Stewart helped launch the careers of Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, John Oliver, and many others. And in bringing journalism or something kind of like journalism to late night entertainment, Stewart upped the game for the entire medium. I'll continue my conversation now with Jon Stewart.

19:12We grew up in New Jersey, but I grew up with another comedian, Bill Maher. I used to play basketball in a driveway with him. He was a local celebrity. You know, there's nothing better than playing basketball with short juice, I have to tell you. Yeah. You can post up on him. We used to have a game at Gary Shandling's house.

19:37Literally, we were like, I think Al Franken might be Pete Maravich. Kevin Nealon would come by and everybody would just be like, what? No! you can't do that yeah and Bill Maher is the is the comic political uh voice of the notion that the biggest problem the Democrats have uh is wokeism how do you respond to Bill's approach to the world well I don't know if that's just Bill's I mean I maybe it's shorthand for it but I wokeism is not something that enters your analysis of things for the most part? No. There is a real pressure that people feel on issues that they don't quite understand, where they don't want to offend, and it can have a censorious effect on discourse.

20:34I've seen it. And the left certainly has their, like when someone says to me, like, pregnant people, I do go, well, it's, I understand, but like, come on. But it doesn't make you crazy. Yeah. If you'd be better to be like pregnant women and Dave, like you don't have to, you know what I mean? Like you don't have to do the whole thing. So yeah, that gets a little out of control. But the idea that that has the same effect on the world as like a rich country that isn't able to give its people health care. That's where I take exception. The one thing I would give him is the most politically effective, so-called the most politically effective advertisement for the Trump campaign was the one about trans people.

21:26You know, she is for them, he is for you. That was extremely effective, unfortunately. Commercial is simple as well. Like, yes, Donald Trump is for you. If you are a convicted sex trafficker who should get transferred to a less bad prison because you're not going to name him. Donald Trump is for you if you have a jet that you will give him. And then or Donald Trump is for you if you give billions to his campaign. And so he will allow you to bypass tariffs and not small businesses. Like my problem is they don't know how to fight that effectively. They do not realize the game they're playing. I don't think in my mind, how do you mean there is a relentlessness and of bad faith to the, uh, social media algorithm.

22:22It's, I'm trying to think like, okay, here's a different analogy. If you go to a restaurant and the food is delicious, it's because they probably like add a little extra bunner or they throw a little salt in there a little umami in there maybe they throw a little sugar in the marinara you know what i mean and like and you eat it and you're like wow that's decadent and beautiful and i would like to come back here but it's still within the realm of what we understand as the earthly tricks we play on each other. But there are guys in lab coats who work for craft, who are figuring out how to take the gland of like a beaver's anus and turn it into strawberry flavoring.

23:10And then there's a bunch of other dudes that are checking the consistency of it and they're designing it to get past the prehistoric reptilian wiring of your brain so that you no longer understand that two bags of chips and a quart of ice cream might not be good for you in the long run. And social media is that. What we do is we communicate and we sometimes use hyperbole and we sometimes use puns and satire and like, totally and all and parody to convey something. and it's cheating a little bit. But social media is ultra-processed speech in the same way that Doritos are food. It's designed to bypass the parts of your brain that keep you off it, that keep you from diving into those holes, from radicalizing yourself.

24:11That's what you're up against. they are designing these things in the lab to bypass our ability to collaborate and cooperate when did these guys get so bad you remember years and years ago always suck ah no but wait a minute we believed or have believed that these guys because they wore jeans and sneakers and they were kind of cool and said things like, don't be evil, and so on and so forth. Isn't that something someone evil would say? It's like Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is always going on about, Satan, Satan, it could be amongst us. It could be Greta Thunberg. And you'd be like, or it could be a guy who runs a company called Palantir.

25:01But wait a minute, you're forgetting the early part of these guys' career. Mark Zuckerberg when is going to make it possible, Sergey Brin was going to make it possible. If you're sitting in the desert somewhere where you didn't have access to a library, now you could read Shakespeare on your phone. And this was amazing. And he was, everybody was going to be connected and this would democratize the press. Yes. And they believed it. And a large part of us believed it. No, they all want to be the next guy. They all just want to be the next must. They want to be the next person. And look, we suffer from the same thing in that we're people.

25:37Like everything that we have that's great can be weaponized against us. Like nuclear power is the, you know, as Oppenheimer once famously said, what could go wrong? John, you've been on Rogan a couple of times? Yes. What did you think of that experience, being on Joe Rogan? I enjoyed being on Rogan. I think he's an interesting interviewer. You know, there are right-wing weaponized commentators whose sole purpose is to manipulate things to the benefit of the Bannon Project or the Project 2025. Rogan's not that guy. What is that guy? How would you describe him? a curious comic who fell into this thing that got fucking enormous maybe doesn't um has opinions all over the political spectrum but has um tendencies that people on the left does not fit the aesthetic he's a hunter he's had people on who were kind of nazi curious that's not good so i mean i've interviewed kissinger like it's and he was carpet bomb curious like yeah i don't know what to say.

26:48Like, like, it's very easy to castigate those where we're like, but he had an opinion a few years back that's, uh, you know, corrosive. But the difference is when he was carpet bomb curious, you didn't say, Oh yeah, that's awesome. And what happens with Rogan sometimes is he'll hear somebody that's on the dangerous end of the spectrum and he'll just kind to soak it in. And so, and this is, I think this is a great point and it's whoever job who thinks that that information is dangerous to fight, to get their point of view out there, to counter what they think is misinformation. You can't just deputize people to say he should have known better and he should have prosecuted that point.

27:32But the reality is John, is that it might be my job or the New York Times job or even your job, but I don't have the audience that Joe Rogan does. Then get it. Yeah, go get it. Then go on that show. Then do those things. It's not acceptable to just say, well, I don't like what he does. Then do it better. Beat them at their own game. It's not enough to just complain that that guy got a platform and don't platform that guy. There's no one in this world right now that isn't platformed. And my biggest frustration, honestly, with a lot of scientists is they all go, RFK, he's so fucked up. That's terrible information.

28:12Oh, OK. What's the information? Nothing. Where are they? Get out there. Fight. I got in trouble. I was giving an interview to a German magazine. I said I would interview Hitler. And I thought that was kind of non-controversial. Is there anybody that you wouldn't interview? It depends on what the expectation is also for the interview. Because remember, a lot of what we're doing right now is we're falling into that trap that an interview, a good interview will solve the problem. I've been on the side of the good interview. I've been on the side. I interviewed Donald Rumsfeld. I lost more sleep over that interview than he did over the entire fucking war.

28:59And you know what he did afterwards? he wrote me a note saying that was fun yeah yeah yeah do you have any idea how that still hurts he wrote that was fun i bet if we had known each other when we were younger we would have been friends oh oh john what did you think of the recent um the business of comedians going to riyadh and being paid a lot of money what did you think of that i don't touch other people's money and you know it's hard man I want to fix my house I want to operate with integrity but I don't want to gatekeep like I'm not I don't go to the tree of hilarity and get visited by the fathers of and I think a lot of comics who came out and really shit on those guys like I know a couple of them and I know them actually to be like garbage humans so I would have preferred if they would have just come out though and said, it's money and not like, it's a way to start a conversation.

30:00Like, would you have started the conversation for$2 ,500? Well, then that's, you know, that's the difference. Look, I worked for Apple. Like there's a lot of people who believe that Apple is exploitative in a way that's horrific. You know, we all have our lines that we are willing to cross. Like we get into a problem when we're unforgiving in any way, we offer no grace. And that doesn't mean that I don't have lines that I draw that if people cross it, I won't do. But I do try to not be so rigid in the way that I think society has become. And if it goes back to that point - Do you know where the lines are ahead of time?