'I won't allow you or your sycophants to turn your cruelty into virtue,' Stewart told Trump in a guest appearance on 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert' Thursday, panning the president's immigration policy and 'Dickensian level of villainy' in separating children from their families. Watch video
Jon Stewart again popped up from his hiding place beneath Stephen Colbert’s desk during an appearance on “The Late Show” Thursday to address President Donald Trump.
The former “Daily Show” host, who grew up in Lawrenceville and owns an animal sanctuary with his wife in Colts Neck, is known for his meditations on Trump during guest appearances on the late-night show. He also recently appeared on a segment in which he proclaimed the existence of central New Jersey.
“Hello, Donald!” Stewart, 55, began his message to Trump. “It’s me! The guy you made sure everyone knew was Jewish on Twitter.”
He was referring to Trump’s 2013 tweet in which he posted, “I promise you that I’m much smarter than Jonathan Leibowitz – I mean Jon Stewart @TheDailyShow. Who, by the way, is totally overrated.”
(Trump followed up that tweet with another saying how Stewart shouldn’t have changed his last name and that he should “be proud of his heritage,” while calling him a “total phony.”)
“It’s just we’re all still having a little trouble adjusting to your presidency as it goes into its 500th year,” an exasperated Stewart said, rubbing his face with his hands.
He said that thanks to Trump, everything is backwards and upside down — “Apparently now, Putin and Kim Jong Un are noble, intelligent role models and Canada’s a bunch of giant ***holes.”
“You’re redoing the postwar alliances only this time, we’re with the Axis powers,” Stewart continued.
He told Trump that a hallmark of his presidency was that, “no matter what you do, it always comes with an extra layer of gleeful cruelty and d**kishness.” He said this could be seen in Trump’s vehement opposition to NFL players taking a knee, in his implying that women who accused him of sexual assault were ugly and in his labeling of the media as enemies of the people.
“It’s not even partisan,” Stewart said. “Anybody in the Republican Party who dares speak against you, they also must be humiliated, even if they have a terminal disease.” In this, he referred to Sen. John McCain, who has brain cancer.
He said the Trump doctrine is best explained by a clip from Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1982 film “Conan the Barbarian”: “Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.”
Stewart told Trump he could have enacted a more stringent border policy without going to the lengths his administration has gone in separating families.
“But I guess it wouldn’t have felt right without a Dickensian level of villainy,” he said. “You casually separated people seeking asylum from their children. From babies.”
So Stewart attempted to bargain with Trump, to give him something he’d want that could possibly compel him to back off of that “gleeful cruelty.”
“How about we give you a giant building with gold toilets and your name on it?” he proposed, only to have Colbert, who lives in Montclair, creep up from underneath the whisper that was where Trump lived. Then how about a news network that would praise everything he did? Colbert informed Stewart about Fox News. Or maybe a volcano that would destroy a portion of Barack Obama’s home state of Hawaii? Enter Colbert with the word on Kilauea.
Stewart gave up on those possibilities, but said he would draw the line on another matter: “I won’t allow you or your sycophants to turn your cruelty into virtue.” With that, he cued some clips of Trump’s defenders calling him a strong leader, a fighter and a “compassionate human being.”
To explain the concept, Stewart referenced Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 speech at Cooper Union. When he was yet to be president, Lincoln said slaveholders wanted free states to “cease to call slavery wrong and join them in calling it right.”
“What Donald Trump wants is for us to stop calling his cruelty and fear and divisiveness wrong, but to join him in calling it right,” he said. “And this we cannot do,” Stewart said, to applause that drowned out the end of his statement: “And by not yielding, we will prevail.” He squeezed out an incomplete sentence as the cheering continued. “Unless, of course, the Democratic leadership continues to be a bunch of feckless …”