Jon Stewart is railing against Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for voting last week to advance a GOP-crafted funding bill, suggesting he led a “total capitulation” to President Trump.
“What are you doing?” Stewart exclaimed of the move by Schumer while hosting Monday’s “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central.
Schumer has come under intense fire following his vote, alongside nine other Senate Democrats, to advance the House Republican-drafted funding bill, which helped avoid a government shutdown.
“And for those of you who may have felt like this was a total capitulation, Sen. Schumer just felt like this wasn’t the moment for Democrats to press their case, because Trump is still too strong,” Stewart said, before playing a clip of the lawmaker saying in an interview that, in the past, Republican legislators started working with Democrats once Trump’s approval rating dipped below 40 percent in polls.
“Apparently the grand plan is Dems keep fecklessly complaining until [Trump’s] 48 [percent] approval comes down to 40, which is a plan, but it’s forgetting one crucial piece of information in Schumer’s popularity calculation,” Stewart said, as he cited a recent NBC News poll showing just 27 percent of Democratic voters had a favorable opinion of their party.
“You’ve got to get Trump to lose 8 points of popularity just for you to get to the point where you’re 13 points below him,” Stewart said.
“Your approval is only 7 points above where it turns red and goes into low power mode,” the 62-year-old comedian cracked.
“Perhaps I’m being too hard on the senator,” Stewart said, before adding with a grin, “although I am not.”
“Perhaps [Schumer] has insider knowledge of a quiet, smoldering Republican amenability to compromise. Perhaps underneath that hard shell of Republican intransigence is a soft, nougaty, center of responsible legislative leadership waiting to be freed,” Stewart told the audience.
He then played audio from Schumer’s appearance on The New York Times’s “The Interview” podcast, in which the senator said he often has conversations with his Republican colleagues at the gym.
“When you’re on that bike in your shorts, panting away next to a Republican, a lot of the inhibitions come off,” Schumer said.
“Peddling really hard and not going anywhere — it’s a great metaphor for the Democratic Party right now,” quipped Stewart, who’s been critical of Schumer in recent weeks on “The Daily Show.”
“But for some reason, there is a persistent fiction within the Democratic Party that if they just hang out with Republicans in the gym, or wait out Trump’s popularity, or give them concessions on a continuing resolution they said would harm the country, the Republicans will finally see the light and Democrats will be rewarded with productive bipartisanship,” Stewart said.
“This fiction that you are inventing, this idea that somehow, ‘Oh, they’ll come to their senses’ — it allows Democrats to keep thinking that Republicans are actually the ones in the precarious position.”
Pointing to prominent Democrats repeatedly since 2012 referring to Republican moves as a “fever dream,” Stewart said, “Excuses you from having to propose an alternative, coherent vision, and allows you to pretend that this is just an issue of messaging and not merit.”
