Jon Stewart says former President Trump has “a very good chance” of winning back the White House if he enters the 2024 race.
“I think he’s got it — he’s got a very good chance. And they’re smarter about it,” Stewart said Sunday during an interview with David Remnick at the 22nd annual New Yorker Festival.
“The danger of the coup — again, Jan. 6 is the TV event moment of it,” the host of “The Problem with Jon Stewart” on Apple TV+, said of the riot by Trump supporters at the Capitol earlier this year. “It’s the special that came out. And that’s what all the TV networks were focused on.”
“He’s brilliant at understanding what will drive the television narratives,” Stewart said, referring to Trump.
Stewart also predicted that if Trump runs again, it will “all be about Jan. 6 and ‘Stop the Steal.'”
“But 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,” he said.
The “actual danger of what happened” at the Capitol in January, Stewart added, “is that it exposed a fragility at a level that is not flashy, or sexy, or known.”
While Trump has repeatedly teased a potential 2024 White House bid, he hasn’t formally declared his candidacy.
“I thought he disqualified himself at every turn [in 2016],” the former “Daily Show” host said of Trump, adding that the former president displayed an “antibiotic-resistant strain of populism.”
“He came at the right moment for that audience with the right message, and unapologetic. And in a lot of ways, I think every time you thought that something was disqualifying or something would defeat him, but for those of us who have been in New York, we probably saw like, if nothing else, the dude’s resilient,” Stewart, 58, said.
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