Comedian Jon Stewart criticized the Democratic Party, President Biden and the White House for what he compared to Trump's mafia-style refusal to answer concerns about the president's debate performance.
Stewart was joined by former Obama aides and Pod Save America co-hosts Jon Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor on "The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart" on Thursday, where he said the Biden administration’s approach to concern was like Omertà, a Sicilian code of silence used by the mafia, which places importance on staying quiet in the face of questioning.
"In a lot of ways using Omertà, as Tommy put it, to stifle what could be an incredibly productive, at least, conversation, even if Joe Biden came out and said, ‘Look, I understand where I am at in my lifespan and cycle and what I do. Here’s how this government works,'" Stewart said, in a clip flagged by Mediaite. "Rather than coming out, and becoming Trumpian and saying, ‘You think someone else could hold NATO together, they could never, only God can tell me to get out of the race.’"
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Stewart went on that nothing the White House has done inspires any confidence in Biden's ability to serve as president.
"If he were to come out and say, ‘Here’s my team, here is how we hold the line,' but we're not seeing any of that. Nothing that's been done inspires any confidence, other than the fatalism of, ‘It is what it is and this is what we're stuck with,' and that's the part that I think has degraded people's trust in institutions and the government from the get-go. That's a problem," he added.
Stewart has been outspoken about his anger toward Democrats and the White House for excusing what he previously described as a "shocking display of cognitive difficulty" by Biden during the presidential debate last month.
"What do I do with my anger at a Democratic Party that honestly has put us in this rock and a hard place position, that wasn't honest over this past year about what was happening internally at the White House, was not in any way preparing the public for Kamala Harris, wasn't doing any of that," Stewart said. "There was a, I don't know if it is complacency or deceit, or whatever it was, but a Democratic Party that missed all of the threats that were coming their way, and has left us vulnerable here."
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Vietor, who was at an in-person fundraiser for Biden along with Favreau a few weeks before the debate, said everyone thought the president did not seem up to the job then, but said they thought it could have been chalked up to jet lag.
"The in-person fundraiser I saw him at in Los Angeles a couple weeks before the debate was as bad as the debate," he said. "Everyone I walked out of the debate with, Jon was there, we were talking to people around us, people we didn't know, and we were like, ‘that was chilling.’"
Actor George Clooney, a longtime Democrat and Biden fundraiser who hosted the event a few weeks before the debate, called on the president to leave the 2024 race in a New York Times guest essay on Wednesday.
"This is about age. Nothing more. But also nothing that can be reversed. We are not going to win in November with this president," Clooney wrote.
"It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate," he said.
