“Holy shit, she crushed it,” said Jon Stewart, live on The Daily Show after the Presidential Debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
The comedian was specifically referring to Harris’ comments on abortion, a topic that was essentially one of the reasons that Harris was on TV tonight rather than President Joe Biden.
Trump falsely said that “everybody” including Democrats wanted the end of Roe vs. Wade, before Harris highlighted that what the move really meant was women bleeding out in car parks as a result of miscarriages after being denied care.
“This is like one of those Groundhog Day movies, where you get to go back and fix the bad way that something happened earlier to the good way and then you learn Italian and the piano and then you get sad and then despondent and then you learn how to love yourself,” Stewart joked.
Stewart kicked off the show by comparing the tight Presidential race to Sydney Sweeney.
“It’s as tight as a teenage boy’s pants during a Sydney Sweeney film festival. It’s tighter than Sydney Sweeney’s scheduling windows given how busy she is with projects and her demand as a producer, to say nothing of the… Anyway, she’s very talented,” he said.
Then, it seemed like we were watching Stewart’s first term in charge of The Daily Show when he addressed former Vice President Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Harris. “Fuck off, seriously. You came this close to destroying the entire world,” he said.
Stewart noted the awkward exchange at the top when Harris graciously went to shake Trump’s hand. “Biden and Trump did not greet each other and Kamala… she went for the handshake. Ladies and gentlemen, what an incredible display of the awkward tension that happens when your son is dating a biracial girl and you meet her parents for the first time,” he said.
Then the former host of The Problem with Jon Stewart started having some fun with Trump’s false comments about immigrants eating pets in Springfield.
“We’re a failing nation,” Trump said. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Stewart added, “Having spent some time in Springfield myself, I believe I know what’s happening here. I believe Trump himself may be becoming one of Springfield’s most famous residents,” before going to an old clip of Grandpa Simpson on The Simpsons.
This is when Stewart, who was able to get in the news that Taylor Swift endorsed Harris for President after the debate, got serious, specifically when Trump refused to take any responsibility for the actions of his followers on January 6.
“You spent two months riling up your base that our country had literally been stolen from them through fraudulent means, that you could never even get a whiff of in a court of law, and let yourself just abuse them. You pressed on. You abused their trust. You showed up for a speech? You f*cking tweeted, ‘Join me on January 6, it will be wild,” he said.
In classic Stewart form, he ended the first half of the live show, by saying that he doesn’t know if the debate will change anything.
“People are awfully set in the manner that they view these proceedings. What I think is a home run answer for one candidate, someone else views as a dodge or a lie, or any of those other things. In some ways, it doesn’t matter what they say anymore, but one thing will always be true, and it is the quality of the former President I respect the least. Whenever he is cornered and forced to face even the smallest of consequences for his own mendacity and scheming, he reverts to the greatest refuge of scoundrels. As shaggy would say, ‘It wasn’t me. I do nothing wrong. I just showed up. They’re the ones who went crazy’. This man who constantly professes to be your champion, who says they’re going to have to go through him to get to you, will always, when the boat is going down will be the first into the lifeboats, because in that moment, he will always say the same thing, ‘I didn’t know anything about it. I was just told to show up for a cruise’, even though everybody knows he was the fucking captain of the ship.”
“In any other country, that lack of accountability, would be disqualifying, but in this country, it means the race is tighter than…,” he concluded.
