Jon Stewart compares Trump Assassination Attempt to 9/11
Jon Stewart was back behind the desk at “The Daily Show” on Tuesday night, the first time Stewart appeared on the show since the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. After some throat-clearing, wondering why he decided to take his old gig again, he turned his satirical gaze toward the incident on everyone’s mind.
Though he has been lampooning Trump for over a decade, he said that the nation “dodged a catastrophe,” then added that once he realized the former president was not seriously injured, he quickly began thinking about politics.
“I have a slight confession to make, and I’m not proud of this in any way, shape or form. But I’m following social media during all this to find out who did it because it’s this pattern I feel like we now have in the country. When we hear about a horrific event, you’re on pins and needles in this sort of reverse demographic lottery to make sure that the psychopathic shooter doesn’t belong to your teams. You sit there going, ‘Please, no Democrats or liberals or progressives.’”
“And we’re all doing it,” he continued. “We’re all doing it because we have to know what our posture will be on the tragedy. Will it be an ‘I told you’ or perhaps a circumspect, ‘But let’s not rush to judgment, we shouldn’t generalize.’ And then it ends up being someone we can’t even figure out in the first place — bullied loner, white guy, registered Republican, donated to a blue PAC, argued conservative causes … I don’t know what’s going on with this guy. We don’t know yet who’s got dibs, who wins, and none of us knows what’s going to happen next — other than there will be another tragedy in this country, self-inflicted, by us to us, and then we’ll have this feeling again.”
He concluded, “I remember it on 9/11, this disorienting ‘holy shit, stop the world, I would like to get off’ feeling. And in that moment, there will be some incredible Americans who, in the midst of it, for some unknown reason, rush towards it and get us back to some sort of equilibrium. And we’ll count on those folks to hold us together again. And it does remind us that, by a hair’s breadth, we dodged catastrophe. But it was still a tragedy. Because one of those first responders lost his life. His name was Corey Comperatore. He was a retired fire chief and he had given his life in service to his community and he died literally shielding his family. He’s a reminder that in those moments of crisis, there are helpers and we can all make a choice to try and be one of those people. Or, you can be one of these guys.”
The winner of 22 Emmys, two Grammys, and five Peabody Awards was supposed to be in Milwaukee, covering the Republican National Convention directly from the scene. However, after the shooting, it was determined that the theater near “The Daily Show” booked near the Fiserv Forum was rezoned from the “soft perimeter” to the “hard perimeter.” Stewart thanked his production crew for making the quick changes to bring the show back to New York, and also thanked the mayor of Milwaukee, who he said had been extremely accommodating.
He still, however, zinged Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who gave some lip service in an interview to “unity” before calling the Democratic Party “a clear and present danger to America.” Stewart concluded that Johnson was “unity in the streets, divisive in the sheets.”
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