“The Daily Show” host likened the former president to a “white hat hacker” who is finding “vulnerabilities” in the country.
“The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart explained how, in some ways, former President Donald Trump is doing the U.S. “a service” through his exploitation of the country’s political system.
“You know how they employ a white hat hacker who will go into a system and find its vulnerabilities? Now, he’s not doing it for our benefit, he’s doing it to exploit it,” said Stewart in the first episode of his Comedy Central podcast “The Weekly Show” on Thursday.
“But what I’m saying is, what if we take the information that he’s delivering us, which is, here are the vulnerabilities in your system that I can exploit. Can’t we reverse engineer that and bolster those very institutions in a way that makes them much less fragile to these kinds of attacks?”
Jane Mayer, the New Yorker’s chief Washington correspondent, told Stewart earlier in the podcast that it’s “not really surprising” that the former president is going after the barriers that stopped him in his first White House term.
“It’s the independent press, the very beginning, he started by attacking the press. It’s the justice system which, of course, we see him attacking every single day,” Mayer said of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
“It’s the FBI, the CIA, the intelligence agencies, anything that has any independent information that could criticize him.”
Stewart said he thinks the “more interesting conversation” has less to do with the former president’s “excesses and his exploitation.”
″[It has] more to do with how do we turn the light on our own beautiful, flawed, confounding system and begin to rebuilt it with more resilience and stability,” Stewart said.
“This isn’t about criticizing Trump, this is about the constructive look at what is making this system so much more vulnerable.”
