Jon Stewart, former host of “The Daily Show,” is warning that everything is being put in place to make it easy for former President Donald Trump to steal the 2024 election with that he calls an “administrative coup.”
In an interview with David Remnick of the New Yorker, Stewart was asked:
“Trump proved himself a colossal liar and admirer of authoritarians, and his incompetence during the pandemic was what it was. January 6th was supported by him and pretty self-evidently in attempt to illegally reverse a democratic election. And yet he persists! He’s quite likely to run in 2024. But how do you feel about it?”
Stewart replied:
“Oh, I think he’s, he’s got it. Got a very good chance, and they’re, they’re smarter about it.
‘What I think they really learned from this exercise was there are really specific pivot points within the American electoral system. And those pivot points are generally the administration of elections run by partisans, but not ideologues. In other words, a lot of those, a lot of the real mechanics and logistics of elections are run by Democrats or Republicans, partisans, but they are administrative positions. If he can replace the administrative functionaries with ideologues, he’s removed almost all of the guard rails that stopped this present one.”
The next takeover by Trump, Stewart predicted, won’t be done with force:
“Forget about that, you know, they were going to storm the Capitol on January 6th and Mike Pence was going to reverse it in some dramatic, you know, ‘And on the finale of The Apprentice… That’s not how this is going to go.”
If and when it happens, Stewart told Remnick, democracy in the United States will be dead:
“It’s going to be an administrative coup, but it will be a democratic coup. So it won’t be a coup and it will bring about a kind of early-stage minority rule. The actual danger of what happened is that it exposed a fragility at a level that is not flashy or sexy or known. The environment is falling apart. Democracy is in peril. Need I go on? This, this, this pandemic, that’s not only endangering the health of people, but their mental health.”
