An Announcement President (with Jon Stewart)

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Before you listen to this episode of Strong Message Here, just a warning that we will be using strong language from the start.

Hello and welcome to Strong Message Here from BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

It's Amanda Inucci.

And it's Helen Lewis.

And this week we are joined by Jon Stewart of The Daily Show to talk about the language of American politics.

John, you had, I noticed, great fun

looking at Trump's ability to come up with words that no one has ever thought of before.

I think the word was equalize a couple of weeks ago.

Equalize.

Which he said,

which he said.

He was talking about trade tariffs and carrying their own back on Europe and whatever.

And he said, basically, what we're doing is equalizing.

That's a new word I came up with.

Probably the best word.

What do you think goes on in his head when he says things like that?

Oh, I think he believes that he has created, you know, imagine you've created a world where you are surrounded by those.

And by the way, this is not a new phenomenon for him.

You know, he did not run a publicly held company.

He ran a, you know, Lord Fauntleroy-esque kind of private.

The United States is now just a subsidiary of the Trump organization.

Yes.

It's become a brand, isn't it?

Thank you.

We're making branding deals, by the way, all over the world, like nobody's ever seen before.

That's his other, nobody's ever seen anything like this.

Yes, there's a lot of deserts to getting a golf course, aren't there?

That's exactly right.

So

I think

in his mind, we're all just NPCs.

We are just non-playable characters in this journey of greatness

as he coins, he invents things.

I don't know that we had toilets till he figured that out.

Like, I think he views himself

in that kind of genre of

Leonardo da Vinci and Alexander the Great.

And if it comes to his mind

and it's new to him,

then it's an invention.

Can I ask you, how much raw, uncut Trump do you listen to?

Because I was surprised when I covered the campaign last year.

Going and listening to those speeches in full is such a different beast from getting the kind of edited highlights.

Sure.

You're talking about Trump After Dark.

You're talking about the pure, the raw

edited, that late night version.

He is the Miles Davis of, you know, there's a certain improvisational

genius to, you know,

what I believe he has done to the American people is he has given us kind of a

secondhand attention deficit disorder because his

the way that his mind works, it is whatever pops into it, he can say, because if you live in a world of no consequence or accountability, you don't ever have, you know how a lot of times you have a little voice in your head.

You probably have it.

The two of you, very upstanding citizens.

You might be in a restaurant.

You might think to yourself,

I'm going to take a shit on the table.

But you probably have a little voice in your head, right?

It'd pop in and go like, nah.

I don't think that's a really good idea, buddy.

Not during happy hour, maybe later.

That's right.

When it's quieter.

Nope.

He's got no voice.

He's got, there is no governor.

There is no

superego.

That's something we've discussed a a lot about whether, you know, everyone says he lies.

And we've discussed whether actually the idea of truth and lying is irrelevant.

It's

whatever makes the moment work, isn't it?

He's in the moment rather than he is the secret.

He is so, and it really is a theory.

You know, he was a huge adherent to Norman Vincent Peale, which was the power of positive thinking.

And there is a certain sense, and by the way, you're seeing it play out,

that you can through the power of will create a reality distortion field

and and if you do it with enough conviction as they would say on uh seinfeld it's not a lie if you believe it if you can do it with enough conviction and with enough tenacity you can actually change

the color from white to blue, from green to red.

Which is presumably why he he loves executive orders because he just says something and then he assumes that that's it's that that's happened.

And he also loves tariffs because he can go 25%,

29%,

and then everybody has to kind of jump.

Yeah.

No, he is, it's an announcement presidency.

Yes.

Yeah.

There doesn't appear to be much follow-through.

And what's lovely about it is in the moment of the announcement, it's hailed as a victory.

I just brought in like no one's ever seen $10 trillion

and

no one's ever seen it.

And it will be by tomorrow.

And it doesn't matter if it happens.

It doesn't matter if any, because the announcement's there.

And so he just makes announcements.

He is, if you remember, Bush on the destroyer with mission accomplished behind it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's his presidency.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he just, and he makes the pronouncements.

And whether they are real or not,

and then he'll, I'll give 135% on China.

You know what?

It's been so successful.

I'm going to drop it down to 30.

What was nothing happened?

I know.

I know.

No,

it was a victory.

But

will this be his undoing?

Because

he feels very optimistic about it.

Okay.

Let me, my theory is, you know, he's a salesman, isn't he?

He is a kind of, he's a prime, solid, compacted black hole of salesmanship.

It's all about transaction it's all about like you say the headline the the figure the thing about salesmen if they sell you a dodgy car they can they can woo you into buying it you sign the thing and then he gets at the salesman then disappears you know that there's no comeback after that it's all about just getting the thing done the see the transaction and then but the thing is he's the president so if he says something is going to happen and then it doesn't happen there is there are four years for people to go um no,

you said Gaza was going to be sorted.

You said there's going to be the Ukraine war was going to be over in a day.

I'm still watching it on the telly and it's got worse.

It's the reality.

It's something that he can't escape from.

Am I being too optimistic?

Too nice.

Poor, sweet, dear Armand.

Yeah, right.

I think

he's the car salesman, but the car salesman go, well, it's a real sadness that the deep state broke your car.

Right.

That Mexican immigrants broke your car.

Thank you.

Yeah, right?

This this john see john and i are in team pessimism well it's not even team pessimism it's there is your mistake is in believing that there is an objective reality armando that he will be held to it's why the court system

is his

most

difficult foe it's why he he finds himself because the difference between the court and the news is on the news, you can say anything.

There is no evidentiary standard on the news.

You may have a news person go, well, years ago, you mentioned that this would be solved over.

But in the court, they have evidentiary standards.

It's why I've always said, I think the problem with the press is their job is not to speculate.

Their job is to litigate, to litigate the boundaries of our shared reality, because so often today we hear there's a right and a left and people live in their own realities.

They don't.

We live in reality.

There's only one.

And the object of any

media endeavor is to litigate the boundaries of that shared reality.

Yeah.

It's to report.

Can I ask you about sainwashing then?

Because I think this is something when I watch the daily show, it's often a place where I see lots and lots of actual raw unfiltered Trump.

Like you're making jokes around it, but actually you're exposing people to a huge amount of the original content.

And then, you know, I mean, I'm not to unfairly pick on the New York Times, who I have a lot of time for, but they reported his West Point commencement speech under the headline, Trump gives commencement speech at West Point, stressing a new era.

And then you read the report.

Oh, it was stressed.

The new era was stressed.

And it's got this sentence in it.

Here you go.

Mr.

Trump also rambled at times as he took shots at his opponents and told stories about his famous golf buddy Gary Player and how the real estate developer William Levitt came to have he quotes trophy wife.

And I I just think if, you know, if Biden had started rambling about trophy wives, if George W.

Bush had started rambling about his favorite golfers halfway through, it would have been a proper story.

But now we've just

internalized it.

This is what you do.

You start talking about Hannibal Lecter and sharks in the middle of your

stump speech.

Yeah.

No, he has established

a lot.

Look,

how many times...

did they think in America, he's done.

The tape comes out from

Access Hollywood.

I'm going to, I can grab them by whatever.

And they don't do anything about it when you're.

Oh my God.

There's a, he comes down an escalator

and announces Mexicans are rapists.

An escalator.

Who makes a political, can you, the greatest speeches?

Churchill, can an escalator, the most emasculating form of conveyance that you could possibly deliver a speech from.

Either that or the penny farthing, you know,

be on a penny farthing.

Juggle on a unicycle and give that speech.

An escalator?

Yeah.

My God, sir.

Yeah.

At long last.

Well, he did say, you know, I could shoot a guy in the face on Fifth Avenue and still get elected.

And by the way, and he could.

The only thing he couldn't do is vaccinate someone on Fifth Avenue because his audience does have some limits.

But

he has redefined, he is an antibiotic resistant form.

of politician and everyone else still believes

it's my favorite thing about liberals in America: we got them now.

Oh, yeah.

They just filed felony charges.

Yeah.

We got them now.

It's, do you remember there was the old cartoon, the coyote and the roadrunner?

Yeah.

And the coyote would go to Acme and would get his TNT in a box and he would blow it.

And he was always trying to get the road.

That's what the liberals and the Democrats in America are the roadrunner.

We got 34 felony convictions.

We got them now.

And then Trump just comes in and goes, me, me.

It's, it's, it's, it's because, you know, the left and the Democrats seem to still think the old rules apply or that there is a reality

that will

be used to judge him against.

That's right.

And, and the thing to, where the optimism comes in, Armando, and I really mean this, is to start imagining the possible.

Yeah.

What if we apply those rules

to the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice?

What if

that was how

we began to approach?

Even think about, you know, what's happening right now.

You know, the big scandal right now in the UK is whether or not Starmer did a U-turn.

Like that is such a classic

old world

analog.

You know, what are they talking about?

And how many people, is it a U-turn?

I think it might, you know, I say it's not a U-turn.

I believe it is perhaps a 90-degree angle and then a K-turn coming off of that.

Really?

I think it's wheels screeching on the pavement in a desperate power move.

It's a centuries-old tradition here.

We have U-turn Day every

15th of the day.

And now they're showing clips of Margaret Thatcher.

No lady doesn't turn.

Do you ever watch British news just to have a...

Is it like, you know, after being involved in a fight, you just go and have a kind of cup of tea?

Is that what British political news looks like to you?

Does it sort of like people arguing about minor bits of budget revision?

And you just think, oh, oh these people are just talking about the economy like a real thing well it's so you know i have i actually have such respect for

british media i've always felt that we are in america the media is the coliseum

and it is incentivized purely to outrage and anger and hatred we we're driven on a it is a bio-based economy and whatever biases within our media is generally towards sensationalism and

laziness and superficial framing.

And we're also kind of over here, we're always confused that in America, you don't have an opposition as such or a leader of the opposition.

You don't have a figurehead who is an opportunities for that opposition to question.

But here's the point I'm getting to is your media, I feel like, is more sophisticated.

I think

we're talking about us.

You two, especially.

I think it's more focused on material matters.

I think question time is a wonderful way to hold people accountable.

And yet,

you still make the same crappy decisions that we make.

And that's the part I can't wrap my head around.

I remember you had an episode of the Daily Show during the phone hacking scandal when David Cameron was brawling with people in the Commons, and you were just sort of delighted that actually there's an outlet in the British political media where people get to say rude things directly to our leader, to our leader's face.

I think my favorite

show of force and bravery and aggression from the Democrats was Chuck Schumer being asked about the Senate minority leader

being asked what he was doing to kind of stop the Trump assault on justice and say, I've written him a strong letter containing seven strong questions.

I've written eight,

eight strong questions.

I've worded them.

Why is this law different from all other laws?

Yeah, it was, I mean, they are at sea.

Yeah.

In a way.

Yeah.

Have you noticed them starting to swear?

Because this is something that I saw that I find slightly, I want to find it charming, but I actually find it pathetic that they just go, whoa, I bloody hate you.

I do.

You know, and like there's been some authenticity training that's come down and has failed utterly.

By the way, that is not in any way a surmisal.

That is exactly what they've done.

All right.

They had a $20 million

consultant group that was there specifically to teach them how to be authentic.

Excellent.

I mean,

it's so much worse than what you could possibly imagine.

Was there a selection of different authentic avatars you could adopt?

There was no actuality.

You remember the choose your fighter video.

Right.

Yes.

You know, they're all now.

They've been convinced that if they just use the word fight, there's a guy running for governor here in New Jersey named Josh Gothammer who has literally put himself into an AI video where he's bare-chested with boxing gloves on in the ring with Trump because he's a fighter.

And then it just rolls to the next, I'll fight for you.

It's fight now is apparently the new consultant's word.

It reeks of inauthenticity.

It is a particle board version of leadership.

It's nonsense.

We're so fucked.

And by the way, I say that word only because I have a little consultant here who will occasionally raise,

he'll raise a little card and go hit him with one.

It's the only reason I do it.

And yet, I mean, we've spoken in the past about the Labour Party when it was run by Ed Miliband during the general election.

And his major interview where he was going to show himself as a tough guy, the phrase that he wanted to say was, am I tough enough?

Like, hell I am.

But he said,

but he said, am I tuss enough?

Tough enough?

Like hell I am.

Hell I am.

Sam I am.

But you were talking recently about the fact that you had a load of, was it Senate and congressional staffers come in to watch a taping to sort of lure the, you know, the people they work for onto the show to talk about politics in a way that can connect people.

Because, you know, I can remember, I can remember Elizabeth Warren going on the Daily Show doing an interview with you.

She talked about toasters in the Consumer Protection Bureau.

And I just thought, oh my god, the Democrats have got somebody who can talk about why we need regulatory agencies in a way that doesn't make me want to die.

But this doesn't seem to be a very good thing.

That's all gone now.

No, right, okay.

This doesn't seem to be a very popular skill, right?

That's part of that world of reality that we remember that's now disappeared.

I miss it.

But what happened then?

So, so you said, would you like to come on the show?

I'd like to, you know, ask you some tough questions, but you also get a chance to talk about your work.

And they all went, they were scared of it.

Well, this was, I mean, years ago.

We don't even do it anymore because not, it's not worth our time.

Wow.

Generally, they have, obviously, they have a press office and they came in to see what, you know, what makes a successful daily show appearance was the query.

And so I said, you know, this is, I said, well, your boss would come on, you know, senator, representative, and they would tell me what they think.

And then I would

nod and tell them what I think.

And then we'd probably go from there for like 10 minutes.

And they'd be like, hmm, so the strategy is authenticity.

And I'd go, no,

that's not a strategy.

I'm saying tell your boss to think something

real

and say it.

They used to write books too.

They would write books, you know, Democrats are Hitler.

And then they would come on the show and I'd go, your book is Democrats are Hitler.

And they'd go, you know, I don't think we're that far off, really.

I think we're actually, you know, I think these political divisions are, it's a media, you know, they're all

studying.

It's why Trump is so successful as a, and they'll tell you, what's the thing they always say about him?

At least he tells you what he thinks.

They don't go to the second part, which is what he thinks may be bonkers.

Yeah.

But that's interesting to me because that's a kind of evolution.

And I've noticed it when interviewing politicians, they're never rude to you.

And actually, it's really difficult in interviews to make yourself be rude or even tough to other people, right?

Because it's just fundamentally, we all want people to like us.

And when you ask them horrible questions, they don't like you.

And I wonder if the change to Trump coming from reality TV, where it's all, you know, I say them to a face.

I don't talk behind people's back.

That kind of psychopathic honesty is valued.

And then the move then to social media, where it's all just people saying, blasting things out with no consequences, not to anyone's face.

Maybe that's the sum of the arc that you're describing, John, about how that sort of language has changed.

Because people don't have to come and have a conversation with you.

They can just do a little, you know, tweet dunk about you if they want to.

What we have now, we sort of talked about reality, right?

Government is almost by design a relatively sort of analog, slow-moving, you know, we're going to go point of order, filibuster.

We're going to, it's very the saucer, the cooling saucer of democracy in the Senate.

Social media is by its nature a hyper-catalyst, something that, so you have a constituency constituency that is in a state of frenetic anxiety and outrage.

You have a government that is even less agile than it was

even in the good old days of bipartisanship.

So that the gap between the two, the chasm, is, I think, is what opens the world in terms of fertile ground for populism, for demagogues.

And you're seeing it.

That's why the executive order is Trump's favorite thing and makes him more popular amongst his base.

Oh, he fixed it.

Now I can move on to the next outrage.

Yeah.

Even if nothing's been done.

And it's that thing of nature aboard as a vacuum.

And what's been happening is proper inquiry and interrogation has been shut down as people avoid the difficult interviews.

People use their own media outlets to get their message across.

So there is no real discussion or debate.

Or you have more conventional politicians who go on certain shows, but will say as little as possible that will cause any bad headlines.

So it's the shutting down of debate.

And therefore, you end up with an electorate who feel a little bit frustrated that they're not getting any genuine answers or hearing anyone talk genuinely, which then...

speaks to the Trump thing of sounding genuine.

I over here, you know, Nigel Farage here is the only politician we know who will speak without notes, will speak sounds like he's being, he's saying what's in his head.

Although when you analyse it, there are all sorts of tripwires there.

It's that sense of

there is no discourse that's properly conducted.

And into that vacuum will step a shoreman or will step someone who has load things to say.

But I'm interested in that idea that maybe during the sort of peak social media of the late 2010s, maybe we jumped on people's language and their gaffe so much.

I know I definitely participated in many times where I laughed at a politician for something they'd said.

And it seems to me that your example about the the antibiotic-resistant Trump is exactly right.

What we created in a lab, we kind of created the sort of super virus that was immune to all of that.

I wonder, are there any dunks that you regret?

Because I know there are dunks that I regret.

And I think, actually, I won't do them again now.

I'm sure.

You know what's so sad is because it's every day.

I can't even go back and think of, you know, are there dunks I regret?

I'm sure.

What I generally regret is the tools of comedy are

for the most part reductive.

I don't have a job if not for stereotypes.

I don't have a job if not for shortcuts and hyperbole.

And it's not the language of illumination necessarily.

It may be

it's cartoon language.

It's Thomas Nast.

in finding a way to bring together and juxtapose images and ideas that what you think gets to the pith and heart of an argument or an idea to be revelatory in how it's put together.

I don't think that's the best way to build a cohesive society or one that's particularly well informed.

It's a thing we do.

But to be fair, nobody expects that of comedy.

Nobody expects comedy to be.

I would disagree with that.

I think now, especially, that is what they expect.

I'm not saying correctly, but I think what they, what I won't defend is when I'm wrong, when I am factually wrong.

And we work very hard to be factually wrong.

But when I'm expressing an idea or an opinion, people may not agree with it.

And we may use language and tools of a comedian.

But I will generally defend pretty hardcore

what I think is the gist of.

Oh, yeah.

And I've said before when people say, you know, is Trump, et cetera, is it too crazy?

Is it beyond satire?

How do you keep up?

And I say, actually, interestingly,

the most effective comedy voices are people like you, John, who have a kind of journalistic approach to what you're doing in that you have researchers that you actually

point out what someone actually said and how it might have deviated from something they might have said two years ago or how it might deviate from something that they then did.

There's that journalistic approach.

But it shouldn't be on your shoulders that people, that you are the main source of news and information.

But, Amanda, that's what's changed, I think.

So, John, you started the Daily Show in 1999, right?

And Amanda, you did the thick of it in 2005.

So, at the kind of start of your satirical careers, you were the kind of comedian-poking fun, and politicians were still the straight man.

You still have politicians who are willing to be politicians.

Now, all politicians want to usurp your role, right?

They want to be comedians, they want to be entertainers.

No one wants to be boring Mr.

Policy anymore.

Do you think that's right?

That's how I sort of see it.

I don't think it's they want to be entertainers, they want to be relevant.

And whatever that means to the algorithm and the people that you see on television, you know, you get your spot on the 24-hour news by being provocative.

You don't get your spot by being

measured.

And you get your spot on Facebook Live or

social media live by being kind of outlandish.

And that's how you raise money.

And we are, I think what's really changed for us is the amount of money that is now profligate in the entire operation.

We went from being a bespoke artisanal bought and sold democracy to the Walmart and Costcos of

sold democracies.

I mean, the amount of money, our president right now has a meme coin.

I don't even,

he had a dinner with 220 of the biggest holders of his meme coin.

He's making hundreds of millions of dollars and also regulating the crypto industry,

which is then going to channel into national infrastructure projects.

Sure, right.

We're beyond the absurdities

of all of this.

But, which gets back to our previous point, this is not not the forever universe.

These things have cycles and lives, and the smart political actors will learn to apply some of these

more forceful and seemingly undemocratic methodologies to bettering the lives.

of those that we deemed the essential workers before we disposed of them.

And if we're able to do that, then I think it's why you see even what's happening now with reform.

What all of a sudden they're coming up with all kinds of economic populism.

But what they really just care about is immigration, as it's always been.

But they expand into that because they see what works, which is why.

And this is going to be the craziest part of our conversation, which is why I'm optimistic and remain so, because the needs of the people haven't changed.

The delivery systems may have changed, the gravitas of the individuals that are trying to get them.

But if the needs of the people don't change, it means they can be met.

Somebody can meet the needs.

And in a way that is not morally reprehensible or completely kleptocratic or corrupt.

It means it can be done.

I'm going to stop you there because I don't want to taint this optimism.

I don't want to go, I'm not sure if the politician has yet been born.

We'll bring in that next circle.

I'm not saying it's born yet.

I'm doing this, man.

Come Come with me.

What happened, and it's happening, you know, we've been reporting on it here.

The

censorship now of the media, the executive orders and what you can and cannot say in your science reports, in your research, in your universities.

Do you feel that?

Do you sure?

Because my concern is that

what you were saying about meeting the needs of the people is

great if it can also be reported, But if there is, if

reporting of the facts is shut down,

then it's much harder to get that kind of narrative across.

I don't know that it's the shutting down.

There's certainly a chilling effect of a federal government that is willing to sue a news organization for $20 billion

because out of three sentences, they chose the clearest one.

to broadcast something that news organizations have been doing now.

This is the lawsuit against CBS for its interview with Camille Harris on 60 Minutes program, which the Republicans claim was deceptively edited.

And they've just essentially, as Anderson, just coughed up the money on the base they don't want the fight.

So they haven't coughed it up yet.

The complication is, and by the way, this is the company I work for.

They have just been bought and they need,

and this is the beauty of our system, they need Donald Trump's FCC to approve the merger.

And so they cannot approve the merger until this lawsuit is settled.

So we've just lost the executive producer of a show called 60 Minutes, which is the sort of preeminent news magazine show in America.

We've lost the executive producer of CBS News because neither one of them,

forget about the money.

I think they're talking about it, $40 million, $50 million.

Forget about the money.

They were asked to apologize and they said, I think I'd rather.

not.

And so they don't work there anymore.

That has a cascading effect throughout.

I've been in the rooms with executives saying to me, you cannot talk about that subject, not because it might not be interesting or not because you might not be able to make it funny, but because our corporate interest overrules your ability.

Now, to be fair, it's not free speech.

None of us is owed that platform.

And again, I'm going to go to the optimism.

What may protect us in some respects from this is

we are a really

broad demographic, multicultural, vast country of a variety of cultures and things.

Information finds a way

and good people find a way.

And so it may not be in the more traditional formats of which we've become accustomed, but it will find a way.

And it will become what the

new order of like what they consider to be the powerful podcasters became you know the the i i believe in this pendulum i believe in the

converted me to team optimism because actually i'll remember one time i know i know i sat on have i got news for you which is our um you know satirical panel show over here and it was the day that boris johnson who had been our prime minister resigned from the commons and we were making a series of let's be honest cheap dick jokes about him i'm not going to pretend it was high false it's what we do it's what we do i thought do you know what the number of times through history and even across the world now that you are allowed to make cruel mean, and unnecessary dick jokes about

your betters is very small.

And here I am performing a vital democratic function.

And I just thought, yeah, there we go.

That's how I'm going to sleep at night tonight.

And also, like you say, social media has been responsible for a lot of damage to how conversations are conducted.

But yes, there may be something in the fact that also,

like you say, you cannot censor in a world where information and the interconnectedness of everybody is so prevailing that, you know, in this world where nothing can be hidden anymore, actually, the act of censorship can't be hidden.

It's exactly right, Armando.

And let's not forget the one thing that we tend to do, unfortunately, is the people that we believe broadly agree with us are granted amnesty.

And the people that broadly disagree with us are vilified.

Look back at the four years of Joe Biden.

You know, they put pressure on different companies to censor censor things.

And by the way, the biggest thing that they censored was his abilities.

And when they say it was a cover-up, the only thing I would argue is, but we all knew it.

Yes.

Yeah.

I know people who, you know, got screamed at by various operatives in a very thick of it style, you know, saying, don't run these pieces.

Don't say this is all a Republican plant.

And, you know.

And the point you were making last week, I think, John, that Jake Tapper, who's brought this book out, he works for CNN.

So presumably he'd been working on this book for six or eight months.

Why didn't he report all that?

I do actually believe the idea that everybody got a bit more lippy immediately after the election because I think there was a kind of democracy is too important to say anything.

But the problem with that is, I don't believe that, right?

That's people being too smart.

But that's such a so that's I completely agree with you, but that is news organizations making a decision that our democracy.

It's the thing that I was so

angry at the Democrats about because what they were saying to us was, This is a cataclysmic, this is an extinction election event.

And now that I've convinced you about the stakes,

this is the person that is going to hold back the tide.

And we're like, I don't think that guy knows where he is.

And you're like, you can't, don't, you can't say that.

Why not?

Yeah.

Because you're letting them win.

No, no, no.

What it says is we've created this environment where we litmus test our own side, forgetting that when we were in the Iraq war, right?

We were fighting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I made jokes about America.

That doesn't mean I wanted al-Qaeda to win.

A lot of times what you're doing with humor is idealistic.

It's begging for better.

Yeah.

And that's oftentimes

when you call out the obvious, you're begging for better.

And when you shut that down, what you're saying to the people is, you know, don't believe your eyes and ears.

Believe our gatekeeping.

And that's how they've lost the trust

of so much of.

That's what I mean about being too clever, right?

I think that's the thing.

As you say, if all the decline was being noticed by 2023, at that point, you could have had a real primary.

And actually, maybe if you did know then, you should have spoken then.

And then you would have run the tape in a corner.

And they did know then.

And it's rife with everyone going,

and I've said this on

other places, but like you get the truth in the green room in the news.

That's where people tell you the truth.

Oh, yeah, this guy, he's just, I'll come in there sometimes at three o'clock in the afternoon.

He's just, he's just mumbling.

Oh,

that's not good.

Yep.

I know.

Anyway, I must ask you our quick fire questions, which I'm going to ask.

Yeah,

I want some optimistic answers here.

All right.

Quick fire.

Here we go.

Here we go.

What's the best political speech you've ever heard?

Robert Kennedy after the death of Martin Luther King.

Martin Luther King was killed

April 1968.

Robert Kennedy was running for president.

King was killed in Memphis, but Kennedy was in Indianapolis and got up on a backup, a flat big truck, I think, and delivered.

It's only five or six minutes long.

America is burning down.

The anger, the rage, the grief.

And he stood up there and he said, I can understand.

you know, you being angry about

this happening,

killed by a a white man, and thinking all white people, my brother was killed by a white man.

And then he talked about grief.

I mean, he quoted, and this is all I think improvised.

He quoted the Greek playwright Aeschylus.

Like, it was, it's this moment in time

where you dreamed of

the possible, where you saw someone whose integrity and heart and abilities all came together in a way that was transcendent.

And two months later, we killed him.

The worst political phrase or buzzword that you would like to consign to the dustbin, or in deference to your Americanness, the trash can.

Oh, thank you for saying that in a way that makes sense to me.

Honestly, I, when I file stuff to my American editor, he's just like, What are you talking about?

What is

what is this autumn of which you speak?

Um, I trust the American people, I, it's, it's,

it's something that they say, the American taxpayer, I trust the American people.

Anybody who is about to say that is about to do something behind the scenes that you don't know about, which absolutely reinforces how little they trust, care about and regard the American people.

I trust that the American people know that this $400 million plane is a gift.

It's just something.

If I can't fly around

in an Emirati fuck palace, then what am I?

What am I?

I hope they put that over his presidential library.

That's a very inspirational question.

They will.

That's where it's going.

I know.

It'd be great if that was the official name.

So they're saying

I'm at the airport.

The Emaretti Palace is about to,

it's coming into land now.

Who do you think is the best political communicator at the moment in politics?

Well, that's, I mean, hands down, that's Donald Trump.

Hands down.

There's, I don't, I'm not sure there's anybody

in the same

pantheon.

I don't know that anybody else is even playing the same game.

I really don't.

I, you know,

they're still out there trying to come up with slogans and meeting with consultants.

And

that you just let him out there.

He could talk for two hours and not get in any trouble and have people,

I mean, almost worshipful.

Yeah.

It's like nothing.

And by the way, I don't think that's necessarily a compliment.

I'm just saying he is by far the most effective political speaker that I think I've

ever seen in a frightful way.

I think it's really fascinating when you watch presidential campaigns.

Usually by the end, they look really knackered and strung out and like they'd rather be anywhere else.

And every time I saw Trump give a speech, there was nowhere else he'd rather be.

He was, he just, he sucked the energy out of the crowd.

He's just very unusual that that, I mean, really, I think if you didn't let him be president, he almost wouldn't mind.

If you just got to campaign for president forever, that would be his personality.

Well, we are in a relationship with a narcissist.

Yes, he's turned the presidency into a perpetual campaign, hasn't he?

It's a campaign about himself and how great he is.

I would say, almost Amando, that he didn't turn it into that.

It turned into that and he exploited it.

We are.

What turned it into that is the news cycle needing, you know, the 24-hour news is built for 9-11.

In the absence of a catastrophic event, there's really nothing but to keep their minute to minutes up, they have to generate the kind of either fear or anger or anything else that they could possibly come up with.

He's capitalized on that in the way that Kennedy was able to do in the early days of the televised debate.

If you listen to the Nixon-Kennedy debate, you'd be like, Nixon wiped the floor with him.

If you watched it on television, you were like, who's the sweaty dude?

Yeah.

Who's Dr.

Pale?

Yeah.

But his ability to, it's not conscious, is it?

It's a, it's a sort of animalistic.

He knows the buttons to push, he knows the

signals to give, and he reads his audience and the public.

You know, he knows what they're looking for, he knows what they don't like.

He has an instinctive ability to do that, almost irrespective of what he's saying.

Do you know what I mean?

It's not the beauty of the phrases, it's just the mentioning of the

leverage in a way that, look, he has always lived a life on the edge of ethical surprise

and bankruptcy, to your point.

And look, his lawyer was Roy Cohn.

You don't have a business where you're like, I want everything buttoned up and buy the book.

Get me Roy Cohn.

Like, that's the guy you get when you want to go like, how do I destroy these people and get what I want?

So it is absolutely conscious.

It is a skill.

It is absolutely intentional.

And it's very difficult to counteract.

And he's playing against people who are putting on like high school stage productions, like the other politicians don't even look how he wiped through.

I'm not even just talking about the Democrats.

He wiped through the Republicans with a similar dismissive swat.

Yeah, he called Ted Cruz's wife ugly and called Marco Rubio little Marco.

And then it was, you know, and then they laughed at Ron DeSantis's high heels.

And then it was basically all over for all of them.

Just, he just bullied them all out.

He inspired an insurrection on the Capitol, watched by billions throughout the world, where police officers were beaten.

And,

you know, two months later, it was like, all right, what's next?

What do we got?

What are we doing here?

Not just that, but it's like, oh, it didn't happen.

You know, there were tourists.

It was patriotic.

It was.

We've gone pessimistic again okay so i'm going to draw this conversation to a close

i'm sorry i didn't i didn't hold up my end of the bargain all the way through

optimism john thank you so much for for joining us and talking about it and um and thank you for coming back to the the daily show um oh yes troubled times yeah i don't know how much fun to be there one day a week i just it's grinding me down to a nub thank you guys well i do have one extra set of words for you um this week, Amanda, which is stepping away, which is what I will be doing for my book tour.

What's happened?

What have you done?

Other book tours.

I meant spending more time with my family.

I don't want to become a distraction.

You know, I feel I've become the story.

Yeah, you've been a huge distraction.

So, yeah, so I will leave you in the very capable hands of a mystery guest for our next episode.

And I entrust you with the Kier Starmer metaphor tree.

I hope you will water it.

And also to the Kiostama Booch tweets.

He's done a few more of those.

So they are ongoing.

Thanks for listening to Strong Message here.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

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