The Daily Show presenter Jon Stewart was unimpressed by the revelations Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski met with President-elect Donald Trump on Monday.
Brzezinski said during the announcement: “To those who ask why we would talk to the president-elect in such difficult times, especially between us, I would ask back: why wouldn’t we?”
Stewart replied, “Um, because you said he was Hitler.”
Responding to a clip in which Scarborough listed all the issues they talked about with Trump, Stewart scoffed, “Oh, I bet you really laid down the gauntlet, Joe. I bet you walked in there and just gave it to him, right?
Stewart used the Morning Joe segment to segue into his larger point of the monologue; that Democrats “have learned nothing” from the past eight years of dealing with Trump’s Republican Party.
“Republicans are playing chess and Democrats are in the nurse’s office because they have their balls glued to their thighs,” Stewart said.
He explained: “The government is, in theory, a constitutional system of checks and balances between equally powerful branches. But what the government actually is is an overly complicated Byzantine bureaucratic maze of rules, loopholes in those rules and norms.”
Stewart argued that Republicans have long ignored norms and gleefully exploited loopholes, ignoring the apparent hypocrisy their political opponents can point out.
Stewart traced this pattern from when Republicans withheld their vote for Obama’s 2016 Supreme Court pick to the current situation where Trump could bypass the usual confirmation process for his controversial Cabinet picks.
“That’s our government in a nutshell. The rules say, ‘we can stop it,’ the loophole says, ‘f–k that.’ And what are you left with? The last refuge of losers: the norms,” Stewart said.
Stewart advised the Democratic party, “Look, let this show be the completely ineffective hypocrisy seekers. I can tell you from experience that it produces no results. You guys are the loophole figuring out how to get things done because (Republicans) don’t care about your standards.”
