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Jon Stewart has returned! The former Daily Show host — who retired in 2015, just ahead of the most contentious presidential election in recent memory — made an appearance on CBS This Morning on Thursday to offer his reaction to Donald Trump getting elected President. This isn’t the first time Stewart has emerged from his self-imposed media exile. He’s appeared several times on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in order to help bolster his old Comedy Central partner in crime during his ratings-challenged election campaign. His most recent appearance came on the night before the election, when he participated in a musical get-out-the-vote extravaganza. This time, Stewart showed up not for comedy but for a serious conversation with Charlie Rose, a conversation wherein Stewart expressed his belief in America and his desire not to see all Trump supporters painted with the same brush.
Said Stewart: “We also have to caution ourselves to the complexity of [our] history. I thought Donald Trump disqualified himself at numerous points. But there’s now this idea that anyone who voted for him has to be defined by the worst of his rhetoric. There are guys in my neighborhood that I love and respect, that I think have incredible qualities, who are not afraid of Mexicans and are not afraid of Muslims and not afraid of blacks; they’re afraid of their insurance premiums. In the liberal community, you hate this idea of creating people as a monolith. Don’t look at Muslims as a monolith. They are individuals. It would be ignorance. But everybody who voted for Trump is a monolith, is a racist. That hypocrisy is also real.”
Stewart went on to talk about how he thinks that Trump’s election was ultimately as much a repudiation of a Republican Congress who ground Washington to a halt as it was a repudiation of Democrat government. But it’s this balanced-ledger approach to liberals and conservatives in the ways that they characterize each other that felt most Stewart-like. Chiding liberals for reading racial animus into votes cast for a candidate whose major platforms were all based on racial animus might feel like a strange thing for a liberal icon like Stewart to do, but it’s really not. This has been Stewart’s modus operandi since his “Rally to Restore Sanity” days. Of course, that was back when he had a TV show from where he could dissect the political situation on a daily basis, so it was merely one of many political takes he had. These days, when he only has three or four opportunities a year to descend from on high and proclaim a pox on both our houses, his words do tend to carry more weight.
