Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, cautioned viewers against placing too much trust in pundits’ certainty about Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election.
The Daily Show
As the election results slowly came in on Tuesday night, indicating Trump’s win and impending return to the White House, Stewart urged his audience to take any definitive statements from pundits with a grain of salt.
“Here’s the thing: we really don’t know much,” he remarked. “After this election, there will be a lot of declarations about the state of our country and the world, but the truth is, we won’t have all the answers. It may seem like the end of the world, but it’s not.”
Stewart emphasized the importance of waking up the next day and working hard to shape the world into a better place. He warned that the lessons pundits draw from the election results will likely be off the mark, and it’s crucial to keep that in mind.
To illustrate his point, Stewart looked back at past punditry following various elections, starting with Barack Obama’s win in 2008. “I think we are moving to a post-racial America,” declared George Stephanopoulos at the time.
“That sentiment didn’t last long,” Stewart joked.
In 2012, the takeaway was that “the GOP needs to send a powerful signal to Hispanic voters that the party respects them,” according to Bill O’Reilly at Fox News.
“And send a signal they did,” remarked Stewart, before playing a clip of Trump in 2016 making disparaging remarks about Mexico.
“Surprisingly, that was deemed a winning message!” Stewart remarked. “And what did Democrats learn from that in 2016?”
Stewart proceeded to show multiple clips of pundits predicting that the Democrats would find their next leader from a “new generation.”
“Do I even need to say it?” deadpanned Stewart, before showing footage of Joe Biden accepting the Democratic nomination in 2020. “And once again, that turned out to be a winning message, leading to an insurrection. The lesson from that, according to pundits in 2021, was that Trump would be ostracized.”
“My point is,” said Stewart, punctuating his statement with expletives, “this is not the end. I assure you, this is not the end. We must regroup and continue fighting every day to build a better society for our children, for the world, for this country. It’s possible.”