Jon Stewart said he knows what “Donald Trump’s whole plan” with his big trade war is, sarcastically celebrating “Liberation Day” as the day when “Jesus rose from the tomb and raised prices on Honda Civics by $2,000 a car.”
On Thursday’s The Weekly Show podcast taped Wednesday, Stewart quipped with fake enthusiasm for the announcement of Trump’s tariff plan, “I don’t know how you traditionally celebrate with your families, but Liberation Day was always, always big. I may go down to Times Square today and see soldiers kissing nurses and see the people throwing their hats in the air. Three cheers for Liberation Day!”
But the whole point of the chaotic nature of the plan’s rollout, Stewart said, more seriously, is the “unpredictability.”
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“This is probably part of what’s driving all the attention to it, which is, I would assume, Donald Trump’s whole plan,” he said, “because god knows the man likes nothing more than a bunch of people not knowing what he’s going to do and hanging on his every word.”
Trump announced his plan to impose a 10 percent baseline tariff on all U.S. imports Thursday in a bizarre speech easily likened to a game show, as global stocks tumbled in real time.
On the bright side, Stewart added that Democratic Senator Corey Booker managed to protest in a way that wasn’t “processed, reactive, and s--tty,” Stewart said, harkening back to Trump’s address to Congress where the Democrats “put on a play” and held up “placards that have ‘Musk Lies’ on it.”
Stewart praised Booker’s 25-hour Senate speech to protest the “crisis” of the Trump administration. “He actually put some teeth behind it, and I actually thought he put a great deal of thought into it, and, and I found it moving,” Stewart said, though he couldn’t help quipping about how Booker didn’t eat or go to the bathroom for 25 hours.
“Maybe the most impressive to me, as an older man, is the lack of urination,” Stewart said. “I’m awakened from dead sleep by urination—not, obviously—I mean by the urge.”
“More importantly, I thought what he did was kind of a primal scream of alarm,” he added, again leaving the jokes behind, “and that’s all I’ll say about that.”
