As President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign continues to implode in the aftermath of last month’s disastrous debate performance, no one is feeling more vindicated right now than Jon Stewart.
Just about five months ago, the comedian made his triumphant return to hosting The Daily Show (on Mondays) and began by laying out the state of the 2024 presidential race. He called Biden and Donald Trump “similarly challenged,” said both men are “chronically outside the norm of anyone who has run for the presidency in the history of this country” and are “stretching the limits of being able to handle the toughest job in the world.”
This “both sides-ism,” as his colleague Jordan Klepper jokingly put it later in the segment, didn’t sit well with me—or many other of the show’s more progressive viewers. Biden might be old, but isn’t Trump fundamentally more dangerous for the fate of American democracy? Responding to the episode under the headline, “Jon Stewart Uses ‘Daily Show’ Return to Equate Trump and Biden,” I lamented the fact that Stewart was utilizing his platform to “tell Americans that their two choices for president are both not that different and equally terrible.”
