Jon Stewart made an extremely candid return to The Daily Show on Monday, delivering a brutal assessment of both President Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Or as he referred to the two: “these fucking guys.”
Stewart rolled footage of Biden last week at a press conference intended to reassure the public about his cognition after the special counsel called him an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
Instead, as Stewart noted, the event was marked by a few misspeaks from the president.
“So Joe Biden had a big press conference to dispel the notion that he may have lost a step ― and, politically speaking, lost three to four steps,” Stewart said.
He said Biden had another chance to prove himself by doing the traditional interview after the Super Bowl where “millions and millions of people could see him competently and clearly lay out his 2024 agenda.”
But Biden declined, and released a TikTok video instead where he answered short questions about the game and praised chocolate chip cookies.
“Fire everyone. Everyone!” Stewart declared. “How do you go on TikTok and end up looking older?”
But Stewart was every bit as hard on Trump, who over the weekend found a strange new way to pronounce “Pennsylvania” then warned that “they” will change the name of the state.
“What the fuck are we doing here, people?” Stewart asked. “Biden’s lost a step, but Trump regularly says things at rallies that would warrant a wellness check.”
Then, he got serious with his audience.
“I’ve learned one thing over these last nine years and I was glib at best and probably dismissive at worst about this,” he said as he delivered his message:
“The work of making this world resemble one that you would prefer to live in is a lunch pail fucking job day in and day out, where thousands of committed, anonymous, smart and dedicated people bang on closed doors and pick up those that are fallen and grind on issues ’til they get a positive result ― and even then have to stay on to make sure that result holds.”
“So the good news is: I’m not saying you don’t have to worry about who wins the election. I’m saying you have to worry about every day before it, and every day after,” he said. “Forever.”
The audience cheered.
“Although, on the plus side, I’m told that someday the sun will run out of hydrogen,” he added.
See his full 20-minute monologue from Monday night’s Daily Show below: