“The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart explained that former President Donald Trump was, in a way, “doing a service” to the United States by exploiting the US political system.
“You know we hire a white hat hacker to go into our systems and find vulnerabilities? He’s not doing it for our benefit, he’s doing it to exploit it,” Stewart said Thursday on the premiere of Comedy Central’s podcast “The Weekly Show.”
“But what I would say is, what if the information that he’s providing us – that there’s a vulnerability here in your system that I can exploit – could we reverse engineer that and harden these institutions in a way that makes them much less vulnerable to this type of attack?”
Jane Mayer, the New Yorker’s Washington bureau chief, told Stewart on the podcast that it was “not at all surprising” that the former president would go after the barriers that held him back during his first term in the White House.
“He started by attacking the independent press, and then of course we see him attacking the justice system every day,” Mayer said of Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
“The FBI, the CIA, the intelligence agencies, any agency that has independent information that can criticize him.”
Stewart said he thinks the “more interesting conversation” has less to do with the former president’s “excesses and exploitation.”
“[It has] “It’s all about shining a light on our own beautifully flawed and messy systems and how we can begin to rebuild them to be more resilient and stable,” Stewart said.
“This is not about criticizing Trump, but about taking a constructive look at what makes this system so fragile.”
