Jon Stewart’s election-night scream came with a promise: ‘This isn’t the end’
Jon Stewart’s “quick message” to election pollsters was an expletive-laden, scream-filled rant that coincided with the result of President Trump winning reelection on Tuesday.
“The Daily Show” guest host, who will continue to anchor the late-night talk show through 2025, initially directed his ire at pollsters who claimed that the presidential election would be close (among other predictions) and apparently underestimated Trump’s potential comeback. Then he unleashed an NSFW directive (that we will not repeat in this family newspaper).
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“I don’t ever wanna f— hear from you again. Ever. I don’t ever wanna hear ‘We’ve corrected for the over-correction.’ You don’t know s— about s—. And I don’t care for you,” the agitated host said during the live election-night special as results came in.
“Here’s what we know: It’s that we don’t really know anything,” Stewart declared. “We’re going to come out of this election and we’re going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is and what this world is. And the truth is, we’re not really gonna know s—. And we’re going to make it seem like this is the finality of our civilization. We’re all going to have to wake up tomorrow morning and work like hell to move the world to the place that we prefer it to be.”
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Stewart reiterated that the lessons that pundits take away from these results and the pronouncements they make with certainty “will be wrong.”
The veteran “Daily Show” host, who returned to the Comedy Central desk as interim host in February, looked back at the “post-racial” proclamations ABC News pundit George Stephanopoulos made when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 and Bill O’Reilly’s remarks on Fox News about a GOP pivot on Hispanic voters when Obama was reelected in 2012. Stewart also presented additional proclamations from pundits ushering in a younger, new generation after Trump, then cut to a contradicting clip of then-78-year-old Joe Biden accepting the 2020 election nomination at the Democratic National Convention.
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Stewart said that “winning message” ultimately led to the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the lesson from that — as the pundits framed it at the time — was Trump would be departing the White House as a “pariah” and never be allowed to step foot in the Capitol again. Also wrong.
“My point is this,” Stewart said, launching into a bleeped outcry. “But this isn’t the end. I promise you. This is not the end. And we have to regroup and we have to continue to fight and continue to work day in and day out to create the better society for our children, for this world, for this country that we know is possible. It’s possible.”
The 15-time Emmy Award winner wasn’t the only TV personality who was shocked on live television Tuesday night. CNN’s Jake Tapper went viral when he uttered “holy smokes” in reaction to an election map that was showing Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, not “over-performing” Biden on John King’s digital map.
“Literally nothing?” the CNN anchor said in disbelief during the live broadcast when the Magic Wall showed a grayed out map. “Literally not one county?”
World leaders swiftly weighed in, from enthusiastic congratulations to more somber and circumspect assurances of continuity in the relationship with Trump.
King, CNN’s national correspondent, had pressed the wrong button and clarified that the map was showing states. He then toggled to another map that showed a few counties where Harris outperformed Biden by 3% or more.
“There might be more out here in the West Coast,” King added. “It’s possible one or two more as they finish the count here. But in the states that matter … in one county in battleground Pennsylvania, she’s outperforming President Biden by 3% or more.”
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