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Trump’s candidacy was so cartoonish, it seemed like something cooked up by The Daily Show. The adults were back in charge, and had been for some time.
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So much so that when Stewart stepped aside from The Daily Show for good on August 6, 2015, less than two months after Donald Trump kicked off his candidacy by describing Mexicans as “rapists” and “drug dealers,” his departure seemed a logical bookend. Nothing that followed has come close.Īfter Barack Obama got elected president, and then reelected, Jon Stewart versus Tucker Carlson on Crossfire had been etched, for the politically obsessed, into the cultural imagination as a moment of triumph against the poison of cable-TV punditry and the culpability of those who partake of it-a live-audience broadcast of history’s arc bending toward justice. This was the dawn of social media, and the twilight of a certain era in television. Whenever Bush spoke, Democrats pictured Will Ferrell. Back then Cheney was as menacing a villain as Democrats could imagine now his daughter is one of the last Republican bulwarks against Trumpism. The Bush years, starring Karl Rove, the Machiavelli of direct mail, and Dick Cheney, the wizard behind the curtain, seem almost quaint now, as does the kind of president who would affectionately nickname his top adviser “Turd Blossom.” During his post-presidency, Bush has largely occupied himself with oil painting, not plotting coups. Bush won a narrow reelection over Senator John Kerry, and it would be no overstatement to say that, in the pre-Obama years that followed, the leader of Democratic resistance was Jon Stewart, and he was holding rallies weeknights at 11 p.m Eastern on Comedy Central. Two weeks after Stewart humiliated Tucker on his own show, President George W. Within months, CNN canceled Crossfire, hurtling Stewart into a position of political influence and superstardom that few comics in America have ever reached. Tucker Carlson was actually the co-host of Crossfire, along with his left-leaning Clinton-era frenemy Paul Begala, but nobody remembers Begala, and why should they? The whole thing went down in history as Jon Stewart versus Tucker Carlson, with Stewart the champion by first-round knockout. “You’re as big a dick on your show,” he said, “as you are on any show.”
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“No,” Stewart shot back, “I’m not gonna be your monkey.” Soon enough he was calling Tucker a dick on national television. Stewart was a guest on Tucker Carlson’s cacophonous CNN political-argument show, Crossfire, a half-hour nightly migraine of debate-club doublespeak, during which Stewart pleaded with Carlson to “stop hurting America.” “Wait, I thought you were gonna be funny,” Tucker sniffed. Stewart originally fired this shot 17 years ago, on October 15, 2004, but if you’re old enough, you surely remember what happened, in part because it was one of the first truly viral political videos of this century. Never should have lumped you in with that terrible terrible person.” “I called Tucker Carlson a dick on National television,” Stewart tweeted. I n March 2021, shortly after Jon Stewart joined Twitter, he tapped the microphone and used his new pulpit to make amends for an infamous act of aggression from his distant past. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.