Jon Stewart is not backing down on his criticisms of President Joe Biden.
In Thursday’s episode of his “Weekly Show” podcast, he compares Biden to Donald Trump, during a conversation that features “Pod Save America” hosts Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor and CNN political commentator Bakari Sellers. The four analyzed Biden’s performance in his recent debate with Trump as well as his subsequent refusal to consider stepping down as the Democratic Party’s nominee for the November election.
Stewart has said he is not necessarily joining the call for Biden to step down, but that the president should at least be open to discussing it.
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It would be better, Stewart says in the episode, “if Joe Biden came out and said, ‘Look, I understand where I’m at in my lifespan and cycle and what I do. Here’s how this government works,’ rather than coming out and becoming Trumpian and saying, ‘You think someone else could hold NATO together? They could never. only God can tell me to get out of the race.'” (During his recent ABC News interview, Biden said, “If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d get out of the race. The Lord Almighty’s not coming down.”)
“If he were to come out and say, ‘Here’s my team. Here’s how we hold the line’ — but we’re not seeing any of that,” Stewart continues on the podcast. “Nothing that’s been done inspires any confidence, other than the fatalism of, ‘It is what it is, and this is what we’re stuck with.’ And that’s the part that I think has degraded people’s trust in institutions and the government from the get-go. That’s a problem.”
Stewart also says that “omertá” — a mafia slang term for a code of silence — is being used to “stifle what could be an incredibly productive conversation,” and points out that Biden himself “suggested” in the past that he would only seek one term as president.
The Biden-Harris campaign recently sent out an email blasting “self-important podcasters” for their critiques of Biden, which many interpreted as a dig against Favreau, Vietor and their “Pod Save America” co-hosts Dan Pfeiffer and Jon Lovett, who are all also former staffers of the Obama-Biden administration.
On “The Weekly Show,” Sellers said he was “mad” that they were called out, and that all factions of the Democratic party need to come together to “rid ourselves of fascism.”
According to Vietor, Biden’s “decline has been pretty rapid,” and despite Biden’s claims that he simply had “a bad night” at the debate, there have been previous causes for concern.
“The in-person fundraiser I saw in Los Angeles a couple weeks before the debate was as bad as the debate,” Vietor says. “Everyone I walked out with was like, ‘That was chilling.'”
George Clooney hosted the L.A. fundraiser, and as Favreau points out on the podcast, the actor has since pulled back on his support of Biden, writing a New York Times article about the Democratic party needing a new nominee.
“He had just flown back from Italy, so everyone was like, ‘He must be so, unbelievably jet-lagged,'” Vietor adds, “but obviously, there is a more systemic problem.”
“The Weekly Show With Jon Stewart” is a Comedy Central podcast hailing from MTV Entertainment and Paramount Audio. See a clip from Thursday’s episode below.
