Jon Stewart on the aftermath of the US election: ‘This is not the end’
On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart reminds viewers to not buy into pundits’ certainty over Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election.
The Daily Show
As the results trickled in on Tuesday night, indicating that Trump won the 2024 presidential election and would return to the White House, Stewart reminded his audience at the Daily Show to take any pundits’ certainty about election lessons with a grain of salt.
“Here’s what we know: we don’t really know anything,” he said. “And that we’re going to come out of this election and we’re going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is, and what this world is, and the truth is we’re not really going to know shit. And we’re going to make it seem like this is the finality of our civilization and this or that.”
“We’re all going to have to wake up tomorrow morning and work like hell to move the world to the place that we’d prefer it to be,” he continued. “And I just want to point out, just as a matter of perspective, that the lessons that our pundits take away from these results, that they will pronounce with certainty, will be wrong. And you have to remember that.”
For evidence, he looked back on the punditry following several recent elections, starting with Barack Obama in 2008. “I think we are moving to a post-racial America,” said George Stephanopoulos at the time.
“Yeah, that lasted a day,” Stewart quipped.
In 2012, the lesson was, according to Bill O’Reilly at Fox News, that “the GOP needs to send a powerful signal to Hispanic voters that the party respects them”.
“And signal to the Hispanic community the GOP did,” Stewart said before a clip of Trump in 2016, saying Mexico sends “drugs, crime and their rapists” to the US.
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“Which apparently was the winning message!” Stewart mused. “And that taught Democrats in 2016 what?”
Stewart then played multiple clips of pundits saying Democrats were bound to find their next leader from “a new generation”.
“Need I say it?” Stewart deadpanned before footage of Joe Biden accepting the Democratic nomination in 2020. “And that turned out to be a winning message again! Which led to an insurrection. And the lesson from that was,” according to more pundits in 2021, that Trump would leave the White House a “pariah”.
“My point is this,” said Stewart. He screamed bleeped-out curses, then got more cogent. “This isn’t the end. I promise you, this is not the end,” he said. “And we have to regroup and we have to continue to fight and continue to work day in and day out to create the better society for our children, for this world, for this country that we know is possible. It’s possible.”
