It’s admittedly hard to say when the 2024 presidential campaign began – the Republican party’s fealty to Donald Trump has been so steadfast, and the nomination of the Democratic incumbent so inevitable, that a rematch of the 2020 election has already played out, on a simmer, for years.
Late-night television, the shrinking arena for self-soothing liberal political comedy, has braced for it with its usual preoccupation on all things Trump; the former president still consumes the bulk of most monologues, even during Joe Biden’s term. Biden as the competent foil to Trump’s raving, idiotic, increasingly ominous threat to democracy has, for over half a decade, been the form’s logic de rigueur.
So the return of erstwhile host Jon Stewart to the Daily Show chair for the first time in nine years, for Monday nights now through November, is a marker as good as any: we’re now in election season, with the attendant political commentary, from moralizing to horse-racing, that that entails. And Stewart opened his tenure with a bang – as news organizations, who have struggled for years with how to report on Trump, grappled with how to handle a special counsel report calling Biden’s mental fitness into question, Stewart went in.
The 61-year-old host devoted the main segment of his return episode to the question of both candidates’ advanced age, and in particular concern among liberal voters that Biden has, to quote Stewart, “lost a step”. (Or, to quote the special counsel Robert Hur’s report, which found insubstantial evidence of any crimes and was dismissed by Democrats as a “hit job”, that Biden is “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”). “These two candidates, they are both similarly challenged,” said Stewart. “We’re not suggesting neither man is vibrant, productive or even capable. But they’re both stretching the limits of being able to handle the toughest job in the world.”
Stewart knows his audience – though the monologue seemed to harken to a bygone day of swing voters (“If your guy loses, bad things might happen, but the country is not over,” he said, “and if your guy wins, the country is not saved”), he spoke to people whose guy is, begrudgingly or not, Joe Biden. “Look, Joe Biden isn’t Donald Trump,” Stewart said. “He hasn’t been indicted as many times, hasn’t had as many fraudulent businesses or been convicted in a civil trial for sexual assault or been ordered to pay defamation charges or stiffed blue collar tradesmen,” among other offenses.
In a question of principle v practicality – call it like you see it, or potentially risk dissuading voters from turning out in an election that very well could decide the fate of democracy in this country – Stewart chose principle. “The stakes of this election don’t make Donald Trump’s opponent less subject to scrutiny,” he said. “It actually makes him more subject to scrutiny. If the barbarians are at the gate, you want Conan standing on the ramparts, not chocolate-chip cookie guy.” He resisted what Late Night host Seth Meyers, back in his SNL days, coined as “clapter” – the obligatory audience response applauding a joke’s virtue than its humor, so common on late-night television now.
And he courted both-sidesism, drawing some pushback from some Democrats online (as well as cheers from some Republicans – “You know you’re in trouble when you’re a Democrat President and Jon Stewart turns on you,” tweeted Wesley Hunt, a Republican congressman from Texas.) The former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann called him a “bothsidesist fraud” on X, formerly Twitter. The independent journalist Aaron Rupar described it as “basically the New York Times op-ed page but in TV form. Both sides are not in fact equally bad!” The writer Joyce Carol Oates panned Stewart’s return as “surprisingly unoriginal” and “in the vein of what mainstream media has been clamoring for months … both sides identical: too old. this is funny or helpful – exactly how?” And Elon Musk, owner of X, heralded Stewart’s take as “balance and humor return!” which is never a good sign.
The other late-night hosts – Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and Daily Show alum Stephen Colbert – unsurprisingly treaded a more cautious track, keeping concern about fitness for office squarely on Trump yet still triggering gleeful Fox News headlines for one-off jokes on Biden’s age. For example: Biden is “so old” he can “communicate with the dead”, joked Colbert after Biden mistakenly claimed to have recently met a deceased French president. Colbert, host of the Late Show on CBS, treated the special counsel’s report as glaringly obvious; “After a 15-month investigation, the special counsel Hur determined: Joe Biden is old,” he deadpanned on Monday’s Late Show. “And I’m sorry you all had to find out this way.”
He also gently dismissed Hur’s characterization of the president as rogue (as did the president’s staff and advisors) for “kinda going off-road” in a report about classified documents and mocked Democrats’ panic about the report and calls for better makeup for Biden: “Explains Maybelline’s new slogan: ‘Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe she’s the only thing standing between us and the complete collapse of American democracy.’”
Meyers, meanwhile, mostly focused on Trump, but noted Biden’s unpopularity among Democrats, who “want him around as much as teens partying in the basement want to see their dad” during elections. And Kimmel, who rarely misses an opportunity to poke fun at the president’s age, spent far more airtime on Trump’s trials and his weight. The story went relatively unaddressed otherwise, though by Thursday, as stories about Biden’s cognitive ability and media chatter around how to cover it percolated, Colbert seemed exasperated by what he saw as false conflation of Biden’s age with Trump’s many alleged crimes. “The media is covering it like it’s any other political story!” he said of Trump’s numerous trials. “Like it’s all a horse race. But in this horse race, one of the horses is old. While one of the horses is old, has foot and mouth disease and keeps quoting Horse Hitler.”
Stewart addressed the both-sidesism critique on Monday evening by doubling down: “I just think it’s better to deal head-on with what’s an apparent issue to people. I mean, we’re just talking here,” said, before joking: “It was never my intention to say out loud what I saw with my eyes and then brain!” He then pivoted to Tucker Carlson, a much more regular target for this era of late-night political comedy. Time will tell if the voter concern on Biden’s age and special counsel report will take on Hillary’s emails level of fixation, or be a blip on the radar. But for a format so firmly focused on, and obviously opposed to, Donald Trump, the story was an unusual ripple in the system.
