Jon Stewart Broke His Silence on Donald Trump
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Jon Stewart briefly emerged from his den of silence on Monday to deliver the Donald Trump thrashing his fans have been longing for, ever since Stewart retired from "The Daily Show" last year.
In a live taping of "The Axe Files" — a podcast with David Axlerod, a former Obama senior advisor — on Monday, Stewart unloaded on Trump, jokingly questioning the presumptive Republican nominee's presidential qualifications.
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"I don't know if Donald Trump is eligible to be president," Stewart said. "And that's not a birther thing. Look, I'm not a constitutional scholar, so I can't necessarily say, but are you eligible to run if you are a man-baby or a baby-man?"
Stewart continued:
"I don't know — and again, I'm not here to be politically incorrect. He is a man-baby. He has the physical countenance of a man and has the temperament and hands of a baby. So to have that together, I mean, for God's sake."
Stewart struck a more serious tone while discussing some of the political forces at work in the 2016 election. Stewart believes that the spike in nativist sentiment in America — a desire to return to traditional customs and protect "native" American (i.e. white) interests — is the product of fear of the country's growing diversity.
Trump stokes that fear "on a daily basis at an incredibly high pitch," which according to Stewart, is why the candidate has had such success in the Republican presidential primary race.
"And this is not, 'We really need to do something about this country facing some difficult problems,'" Stewart said. "This is, 'You are run by a tyrant. He is going to take away your rights. We are falling. There are rapists and murders at the border coming to kill you.'"
"If that's what you've been fed, and that's what you're buying into, Donald Trump makes more sense than anybody else out there because he's going, 'The Visigoths are at the gate, let's build a fucking wall," Steward said.
