“Welcome to the resistance,” Jon Stewart began Monday’s episode of The Daily Show, where he joined the chorus of late-night TV reactions to Donald Tr
“Welcome to the resistance,” Jon Stewart began Monday’s episode of The Daily Show, where he joined the chorus of late-night TV reactions to Donald Trump’s 2024 win. “I promise you: For the remainder of the next four years, I will only speak to you in this tone of voice this close to the camera. I will be relentless—or, well, they will,” he said, acknowledging The Daily Show correspondents who host the program Tuesday through Thursday. “I’m here Mondays, really not even that many. There’s dark weeks and holidays. It’s truly about 15 hours of resistance total.”
The last time Stewart sat behind The Daily Show desk was to host the live one-hour 2024 election night special. “It seemed, even at that moment, very clear that Donald Trump had won the election in a bit of a thumpening,” said Stewart—though the victory came as a shock, in part, because “we had all been told by many of our best prognosticators that it was going to be close.” He then played a montage of many such pundits, who have since gone on to analyze Kamala Harris’s loss. “It’s a delight to hear about why it happened from so many people who were so wrong about what was going to happen,” Stewart quipped.
Stewart followed up by lasering in on the argument that Democrats lost because they had gone “too woke” in campaigning. “I only have one problem with the ‘woke’ theory,” Stewart replied. “I just didn’t recall seeing any Democrats running on woke shit.” This was accompanied by clips of Democratic campaign ads highlighting conservative-to-moderate stances on issues like immigration and the police. “They didn’t talk about pronouns. They didn’t say ‘Latinx.’ It was the opposite,” Stewart continued. “And don’t forget about Kamala Harris. It’s not like she was exactly waving around her NPR tote bag,” he said, cutting to the clip of her declaring, “I own a Glock” on 60 Minutes.
Stewart later added, “They didn’t do the woke thing. They acted like Republicans for the last four months. They wore camo hats and went to Cheney family reunions. Do you know how dangerous it is to wear a hunting hat around the Cheneys?”
His theory on the left’s losing strategy? “Democrats were mostly running against an identity that was defined for them based on a couple of months of post-George Floyd “Defund the Police” #MeToo Instagram posts from four years ago,” Stewart said. “The country felt like government wasn’t working for them, and the Democrats in particular were taking their hard-earned money and giving it to people who didn’t deserve it as much as them. And so the Democrats got shellacked.”
Stewart then dug into Democrats’ fundraising efforts, noting that they “did protect democracy—just for the other side,” adding, “Because when all is said and done, we had a free and fair election in which the Democrats had been prepared for almost every scenario but one. It turns out the election was stolen by more people voting for Donald Trump. It’s quite a caper.”
But Stewart didn’t end his nearly 15-minute monologue on a sour note. “I just want to please assure people this isn’t forever. This is the map in 1984 when Ronald Reagan won,” he said, showing a country awash in red, except for Minnesota, his opponent’s home state.
“Everyone thought, that’s the end of the Democrats,” Stewart said. “But eight years later, there was a Democrat back in office. We don’t know what’s going to happen in four years at all.”
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