Comedian and The Daily Show Host Jon Stewart questioned whether former President Donald Trump was “to some extent exposing the reality of crony capitalism, the transactional corruption that is at the heart of corporate and political America.”
In his conversation with Mayer and Bookbinder, Stewart questioned whether Trump was “exposing the reality” of “crony capitalism” and “dealing corruption” in “corporate and political America.” The former president was recently convicted of 34 counts of first-degree falsifying business records in connection with payments made to adult entertainment star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign.
“Is he exposing reality? I’m not saying he’s overstepping the bounds,” Stewart said. “I’m not saying he’s not tapping into reality, but I wonder if he is exposing, to some extent, the reality of crony capitalism, the reality of transactional corruption that is at the heart of corporate and political America.”
Stewart also spoke about Trump pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brian Raffensperger “to find 11,000 votes” and about Trump “pressuring Ukraine” to investigate President Joe Biden while he was president in 2019.
“What I’ve seen is that money gets bigger and bigger and it corrupts government, but it hasn’t always been that way,” Mayer said on the podcast. “That’s not the whole story. There are an incredible number of people in Washington, Republicans and Democrats, who are really committed to doing the right thing for the right reasons. They’re just interested in policy, they’re interested in serving their country. And he really puts that whole possibility down.”
Following Trump’s conviction, the former president slammed Biden, calling the sentence a “fraudulent decision” designed to “hurt” his political opponents.
As Breitbart News previously reported, Judge Juan Marchan, who presided over Trump’s business records trial, donated money to Biden, a violation of judicial ethics rules.
Stewart added that he considers the former president a “Trumpist,” explaining, “To him, none of this matters if it’s convenient for him. A rigged election is an election outcome that he doesn’t win. It’s a rigged election if the deep state rules against him. It’s a rigged election if the judicial system rules against him.”
“But he’s expressing frustration. Two things may be true: One, there are a lot of really good, dedicated policymakers and honest, good-hearted people in Washington who are working every day to try to make this country better,” Stewart continued. “And the second is that the system is so out of touch with the needs of the people, so isolated and isolated within Washington and the very idiosyncratic system within it, that even the goals that honest, good-hearted people want can’t actually be achieved.”
Stewart added that “in a way,” Trump is “doing us a service” in the same way that companies “hire white hat hackers to go into systems and find vulnerabilities.”
“He’s not doing it for our benefit, he’s doing it to exploit it,” Stewart added, “but what I would say is, once we have the information that he’s providing us – that this is a vulnerability in your system and we can exploit it – can we reverse engineer it?”
Speaking as a guest on comedian Tom Segura’s podcast, Stewart said the system is “rigged”, adding that “someone can be right about the diagnosis but wrong about the treatment”.
