The Problem with Jon Stewart (2021) s02e12 Episode Script

[audience cheering, applauding]
Hey!
- [grunts]
- [audience member whistles]
Welcome!
[vocalizing]
Good evening, everybody.
My name is Jon Stewart.
Welcome to the finale of
season 2 of The Problem.
[stammers]
- [audience cheering]
- I thought that would get--
No, I thought-- Uh, it just seemed--
It was met-- met with apathy
on that one really.
- [audience laughs]
- Welcome to the finale.
- Oh! Uh, my name is Jon Stewart.
- [audience chuckling]
Obviously huge news this week
that everyone’s talking about.
Finally, the new Barbie posters are here.
- [audience cheering, applauding]
- [Stewart] I mean, come on!
Come on!
Looking good!
No one passes over this Yiddishe queen.
[audience chuckling]
- [audience chuckling]
- [chuckles]
That’s a Passover thing, I think.
I don’t know.
Of course, the other news this week was
the official indictment of
former president Donald J. Trump.
- [audience cheering, applauding]
- It--
- [mouthing] You bastards.
- [applause continues]
[clears throat]
And the finale of season 2.
[audience chuckles, applauding]
No! I don’t even want it!
I don’t want your sympathy.
I don’t want your sympathy applause.
Donald J. Trump was indicted.
It was the climax to the weeks-long orgy
of media speculation and anticipation.
And like most orgies,
it began with directions.
[reporter 1]
Live pictures from Palm Beach.
The former president expected
to be leaving any second.
[reporter 2] Currently on Ocean Boulevard.
And it’s gonna be taking
a right turn onto Southern Boulevard,
five miles directly east
to get to the airport.
And he will be crossing over
onto Bingham Island,
which is the causeway that connects
Palm Beach to West Palm Beach.
We should expect this ride to be about
five, six minutes at that point, Andrea,
before he arrives
to Palm Beach International Airport.
[audience chuckling]
Oh, my God.
MapQuest is such a good TV show.
[audience laughing]
What happens next?
[reporter 3] The former president is gonna
get out of that car and
We’re obviously at quite
a distance to see if
that is he going up the steps,
the back of the plane.
[audience chuckling]
You fucking hate yourselves, don’t you?
[audience laughing]
Now, of course, you can make the case
that the news media soiled themselves
in up-to-the-second footage narration,
but this has been
a difficult time for them.
You see, the president was indicted
on Thursday. A historic event.
But unfortunately, the indictment was
sealed until the arraignment on Tuesday,
which left them only five days of
abject, unanswerable speculation.
- To the dumbass machine!
- [audience chuckling]
So what will the upshot be politically of
Donald Trump’s indictment?
Can I just get your kind of Chris-o-meter,
in terms of, um, how much you think
this changes the country, if at all?
Do you think the case in Manhattan
benefits his political campaign?
Will it help him or hurt him?
You think historians will look back
and say it helped Trump get reelected?
This was a commercial-free,
nonstop circle jerk-ararium.
[audience chuckling]
Now, normally I would say,
all right, you’re overly excited
and O.J. hasn’t killed anybody in years
[audience chuckling]
and I’m sure you could be talking more
about Florida passing permitless carry
or Nashville's student protests
or the heartless killing of
a nine-year-old’s goat.
- Her goat!
- [audience chuckling]
And worse,
her goat was killed by this man!
[shouting] No!
Damn you!
First you ski into Gwyneth Paltrow
[audience laughing]
and then you kill that girl’s goat.
Will this skiing optometrist
stop at nothing?
Am I the only one who watched that trial?
- Why’s everybody--
- [audience laughs]
But perhaps the media’s speculation
and anticipation and wonder
will all be worth it.
For on indictment day,
it was Christmas morn for all.
The indictment can now be unsealed
and that is what we’re all waiting for
with bated breath.
I’d love to just show everyone
what we’ve been waiting for.
This is the indictment. So we now have it.
He’s charged with 34 felony counts of
falsifying business records
in the first degree.
[inhales sharply] Oh, my God, I’m going
to fuck the shit out of that indictment.
[grunts] Oh, yeah! Read it to me.
[audience chuckling]
Can I tell you something? I’m so old
that I do now literally only fuck
- on a rolling chair.
- [audience laughing]
It’s the only momentum I can build up.
If your hips don’t move anymore,
you need something to swivel.
[chuckles]
All right, the indictment came down.
It’s 30--
You know what? I just forgot.
I’m not a lawyer.
Is-- Is any of this normal?
This DA’s office prosecutes
this crime all the time.
This is a mundane business records crime
that is not uncommon
and it’s not uncommon
from this prosecutor.
Oh. Well, that’s awesome.
That’s, uh, just a normal indictment
charging Donald J. Trump
with 34 felony counts of
falsifying business records.
Or to translate that into jaded news-ish
Do you see anything new in there today
that you didn’t know?
No. In fact, I, um--
It-- It’s kind of expected
that there would be less
than people would want to read.
People felt it was a little underwhelming.
Some found it disappointing.
It depressed some people on the left.
Oh, were you disappointed?
Were you depressed? Here’s why.
’Cause you treated this
like the final confrontation with Thanos
and then it actually just
played out like what it was,
a boring-as-shit legal procedure
at the very beginning of
what will be a long, drawn-out,
laborious legal process
because as I mentioned earlier,
law is boring as shit.
[audience chuckling]
But please continue being let down
by the expectations
you motherfuckers created.
This is one of the most historic cases,
arguably the most significant case
right now, in an American court system.
It appears to be built
on a pretty shaky foundation.
It’s a bubble case. It’s not a slam dunk.
Commentators across the spectrum
are saying,
"Boy, there’s really not much in here."
Raises all kinds of questions about
the legal theory behind this case.
An unimpressive document.
Right, ’cause it’s not the trial.
You’re thinking of the trial part.
It’s like if you look at
a recipe for apple brown Betty
and go, "Butter, apple, cinnamon.
I don’t know, I’m underwhelmed.
This isn’t-- This isn’t delicious at all."
Yeah, ’cause it’s fucking paper.
It’s the recipe.
It’s not the game, it’s the roster.
And by the way, only our media,
those cloistered, short-attention-span,
own-ass-spelunking--
- [audience chuckling]
- [audience member cheers]
- No, defenders of democracy
- [audience chuckling]
find a president paying hush money
to a Playboy model and an adult film star,
and then cooking the books to help himself
win an election, underwhelming and boring.
By the way, does anybody--
and this is just an off-topic thing--
did anyone think $130,000
to Stormy Daniels seems a little light?
Is that-- In this economy, in this mark--
[stammers] The only thing I’m thinking is
you could probably get that much
hush money for banging an alderman.
- Like, it’s--
- [audience laughing]
I’ve seen people get $750,000
for spilling coffee on themselves.
Like, that’s just a dollar figure
not of this era.
That’s some shit, like,
Taft or Coolidge would have pulled.
[audience laughing]
Coolidge would have been like,
"How about $130,000
or perhaps, hmm, a Model T?"
[audience laughing]
But I’m sorry, I interrupted you.
The one person we have not heard from
is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
- Now, he is still in recovery
- Yeah.
- after that fall.
- Mm-hmm.
But talk about why the silence of
Mitch McConnell,
fall or no fall, speaks volumes.
[audience chuckling]
I’m gonna go with "fall."
[audience laughing]
Let me ask you, coma or no coma,
why hasn’t Mitch McConnell responded
or at least dilated his pupils?
Epic fucking media fail.
Now, there was a media
organization that shined,
that executed this story exactly the way
their organization was intended
to execute this story.
Or at least according
to their texts and emails.
Fox News, a network founded
on two sacred principles:
that women should never wear pants
and Republican presidents should never
face consequences. Literally.
Roger Ailes invented Fox News
to make sure that the next Nixon
got away with it, to protect their king.
So how did they meet the moment?
Pure, unadulterated, uncut, right in
the veins, fear-laced catastrophizing.
I think this is a dark day,
a dark moment in American history.
[Levin] This is a war on the party.
It is a war on conservatism and MAGA.
This country will become
a banana republic.
The rule of law
in the United States of America died.
- [anchor] It’s dead.
- It’s dead.
It’s like Stalin’s purges.
Probably not the best time
to give up your AR-15.
The most threatening thing to our republic
since South Carolina fired shots
at Fort Sumter and started the Civil War.
- [audience chuckles]
- [in Southern accent] I-- I say, I say,
- what there, boy?
- [audience laughs]
You Yankees think you can come down here
and keep me from utilizing fraudulent
accounting to pay my adult film--
Well, not film, I guess, back then.
But-- Stage?
[normal voice] I don’t know what they did
back then for porn.
Did they have porn in the 18th ce--
All right.
- [audience laughing]
- [chuckles]
That’s crazy.
But I’m not quite ready yet
to take up arms
against my fellow countrymen over this.
Do you have anything else?
I’m gonna make a prediction.
By 2025, we are going to be at war.
We are going to have a new dollar,
a currency that probably
is coming from the central bank.
We’ll have a currency collapse, uh,
and we will live
in a virtual police state.
The Bill of Rights is gone.
Please turn to God, repent,
pray for our country, pray for peace.
Put on the full armor of God.
[audience chuckling]
Full armor of God and pray for p--
Yes, as it says in the Bible,
"Blessed are the real estate moguls
for they shall inherit the earth."
Well, more of the earth
than they inherited when they were born,
which was already a substantial
part of the earth, but--
Shit got weird over at Fox.
Now, all of a sudden,
consensual is a felony?
[audience chuckling]
First of all, why does it seem like
he’s just learning the word consensual?
[audience laughs]
But yeah, that’s what they’re doing.
They’re charging Trump
with a felony for consensual sex.
That’s exactly what they’re doing.
But the greatest mind trick,
the Jedi mind trick
in the reality distortion field of
Fox’s arsenal came next.
He’s become a symbol.
He’s become a symbol
for the disaffected man and woman
and the forgotten person in America.
They see Donald Trump as a symbol,
really, of freedom--
As a symbol for all the freedom-loving
patriots in this country.
They’re really coming after all of us.
He’s the one that’s standing in the way
and he’s been that figure for us
for so many years.
They gotta take him out so they can
get to the rest of us.
But he’s gonna stand firm and strong.
If there was ever somebody
to fight this fight, it’s Donald Trump.
There it is folks.
Donald Trump, selfless hero.
A man who cannot go anywhere
unless his name is in giant letters
on that conveyance
is an egoless freedom fighter
for the little man,
battling desperately until
there is no one in his inner circle left
to go to jail for him.
A man whose malignant narcissism
knows no bounds.
Yeah, that guy is actually on
the ramparts, shielding the regular joes.
This motherfucker is so selfish,
he didn’t even give his sons a jawline.
[audience laughing]
My jawline, not their jawline, mine!
Trump is not fighting for you.
You are his human shields
and you always have been.
And it’s a shame,
because I’m not sure I would agree
with any of you politically,
but you deserve better.
Let’s get to the panel.
[audience applauding, cheering]
So
the media is screwing this up.
To talk about why and how,
we are joined remotely by Norman Ornstein,
a political scientist at
the American Enterprise Institute.
Did I wake you up, Norman?
You-- I-- I--
You know, I’m now really upset
because I left
my full armor of God at home
- and I’m not gonna have it for my seder.
- [chuckles]
- I don’t know what I’m gonna do.
- Why don’t you--
And a chag sameach to you and the, what,
the one Jew in the audience.
Thank you. You should always
have your full armor of God.
Norman Ornstein, uh,
in-- in all your experience,
you’ve written books
about the rise of Trump,
about, uh, the media-industrial complex.
I’m angrier at CNN almost more
than any other organization.
Why is coverage this way?
The one thing that I find
most disturbing about the media,
is that there’s no
learning curve whatsoever.
This is a guy who called them,
uh, basically the worst things imaginable.
That, uh, the first people to go,
if we ever get to that Trumpian autocracy,
are gonna be the press.
And they play into his hands
over and over again.
And, you know, the way they treated this,
which you handled absolutely brilliantly,
making this huge deal out of it and then
saying there’s a nothing burger there,
is just disgraceful. Uh
- And it’s not benign.
- Maybe they are the enemy of the people.
It’s not benign.
Fox has weaponized misinformation,
the internet has weaponized misinformation.
And if you don’t have
a tenacious counterforce
battling that position at every turn,
then misinformation
that’s been weaponized wins the day.
Absolutely so, and of course,
what’s also happened is
they bring on people who lie
and who exaggerate
and there is no pushback whatsoever.
They are normalizing the abnormal,
they’re hyping what shouldn’t be hyped
and they’re giving a pass
to things that shouldn’t get a pass.
And it happens over and over
and over again.
It’s Friday the 13th,
uh, part 27 right now.
Ooh, is that coming out, Norman?
Because that sounds interesting.
It’ll be on CNN.
[Stewart, audience laughing]
I really do wonder sometimes,
in a healthy country,
in a healthy democracy,
you would think that the efforts that
Donald Trump and his inner circle went
to circumvent a democratic election
would be disqualifying
in a myriad of ways.
Why do you think we are unable
to hold presidents to account?
One of the things
that’s disturbing about this,
and we saw this throughout
Trump’s presidency,
scandal after scandal after scandal,
and the press couldn’t handle it.
Everything washed over itself.
And we’re gonna see this now with
the different indictments that go forward.
But they have to have a frame
where each president, in that sense,
is viewed in the same way.
So the scandal with Barack Obama
was he wore a tan suit.
- I remember that, I remember that suit.
- And Donald Trump basically taking--
- Yeah, it was a nice suit.
- Yeah.
And [stammers]
what’s so disturbing about this
is that you don’t see any sense of
self-reflection, any willingness to change
and it’s leading us in a very bad place.
It does expose the river of corruption
at the heart of the American
so-called democratic capitalist system.
That this idea of paying for favor,
this moat that surrounds
the nation’s capital
that’s filled with, uh, money
that nobody can trace
and lobbyists that are not
accountable to anybody.
We’re Tammany Hall.
And this entire country
is built, uh, right now
on that pay-to-play premise.
Donald Trump has spent 60 years
paying off people,
using the system for his own good
to avoid accountability.
And whatever the press does,
let’s hope the legal system finally brings
some measure of accountability.
And I-- I also wanna say, Jon,
that the stuff that, uh, was said about,
"Oh, well, there’s nothing new here,"
we actually know some new facts here.
Including the fact
that Trump wanted to hold,
uh, Stormy Daniels, uh--
To stay quiet through
the election campaign
and then not pay her.
So he could bilk her even as he tried
to use this to steal the election.
Uh, we’re gonna find out a lot more
and it involves a lot more
than just Donald Trump.
There was a massive attempt to use
this process days before the election,
after the tapes had come out
from Access Hollywood,
to avoid accountability in an election.
And while this is not as serious
as promoting a violent insurrection
Correct.
as trying to convince
the Secretary of State in Georgia
and the governor to give him back Georgia
by stealing 10,700-plus votes,
the fact is that
this probably had more to do
with him winning
the 2016 election illegitimately
- [Stewart] Right.
- than those other things.
Uh, Norman, it’s all information
that really grabs me by my pussy.
- It really does.
- [audience chuckling]
Uh, Norman Ornstein,
thank you so much for joining us today.
Well, you’re a celebrity, so you should.
- [Stewart] Excellent work!
- Thank you.
- So
- [audience applauding]
Ah!
A powerful person is being
put through a legal process that is,
quite frankly, ordinary for many people.
Or to put that another way
I never thought anything like this
could happen in America.
I never thought it could happen.
If I had, I-I probably wouldn’t have
committed all those crimes
- [audience chuckles]
- for all those years.
But if there’s one positive,
it’s that those on the right
are now finally woke to something
that the powerless
have experienced for centuries.
There’s a two-tiered system of justice.
There is no longer in this country--
And I say this with a lot of sadness,
equal justice under the law
or equal application of our laws.
Sadly, we do have
a two-tiered system of justice.
What are we going to do
about these two standards of justice?
[imitating Edith Bunker] Archie, Archie?
[audience laughs]
There’s a two-tiered
system of justice, Archie.
Oh [stammers] now Meathead is here.
[audience laughs]
[normal voice] But there is.
But here’s the thing--
You know Trump is in the good tier, right?
He’s in this tier.
Former President Trump successful today
in a request to delay the release of
White House documents.
Trump’s lawyers filed to have her case
moved from state to federal court
refusing to cooperate
with the impeachment inquiry.
He is challenging that subpoena.
Block the FBI from looking
at the seized materials
until a special master can be appointed.
Oh, yeah, Your Honor,
I prefer you not look
at the liquor store security footage
until a, uh, special master that don’t--
Fuck it! Easy on the wrists.
[audience laughs]
To be fair,
you are well within your rights
to vigorously defend yourself
against legal charges.
And that’s what this process
is going to entail.
But in the not-good tier,
you don’t have the resources to do that.
And chances are
you don’t have this either.
DonaldJTrump.com. Go tonight.
Give the president some money
to fight this bullshit.
[audience chuckling]
You are not in the bad tier
of our justice system
if a US senator
is fronting your GoFundMe page.
But as those in the bad tier know,
when in doubt,
launch veiled threats
on the prosecutors’ and judges’ families.
This lunatic special prosecutor
named Jack Smith,
I wonder what it was prior to a change.
I have a Trump-hating judge
with a Trump-hating wife and family.
Whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris
and now receives money
from the Biden-Harris campaign.
Look, I’m not a lawyer
but I’m pretty sure most people
can’t get away with doing that.
You know what else they can’t do?
Just claim that by their nature of being,
they are universally,
cosmically unable to crime.
Donald Trump is actually claiming
absolute immunity
from criminal investigation.
- How much crime do you have to do
- [audience laughs]
to build up absolute immunity?
Is that immunity coming
from committing crimes
or did you get the crime jab?
Did you get the jab?
The MRNA-Bill-Gates-crime jab?
He’s tracking your crime.
Trump has used privilege and wealth
to protect himself
from legal accountability at every turn.
He has lived his entire adult life
in the space twixt illegal and unethical.
He’s in the tier where you get
the platinum arraignment package.
No cuffs. No mug shot.
All-you-can-eat fingerprint ink.
You think regular people
get to surround themselves
with a meat shield of henchmen
to go to prison in their place?
But if you really wanna know
what tier Donald Trump is in,
let’s look at an actual fraud
we know he was guilty of.
He used his own charitable foundation
like a piggy bank.
Or as it’s sometimes known: embezzlement.
[reporter 4]
"A shocking pattern of illegality,
including unlawful coordination
with the Trump presidential campaign,
repeated and willful self-dealing
and much more."
He stole from his own
charitable foundation.
How much more could--
What, did he also nut punch a priest?
Like
[audience laughs]
How are non-Trumps punished
for something like that?
Well, some get two years in jail.
Some get five years in jail.
Some get ten years in jail
for stealing from charitable donations.
But what happened to
this selfless [swallows]
shield of the working man?
[audience chuckles]
Well, he agreed to shut down
his charity piggy bank
and paid a $2 million settlement.
Or on your Trump conversion chart,
15-16 porn star hushings.
He wasn’t even charged with a crime.
So when people say this
It’s selective prosecution and it’s wrong.
Selective prosecution on steroids.
It does feel like a selective prosecution.
If his name were John Smith,
no, Bragg would not be bringing this case.
If his name was John Smith,
he’d be in jail already.
He-- Yes.
[audience laughs]
It’s all selective prosecution.
And when you’re in the good tier,
you can do whatever you want
and you’re probably gonna be fine.
In fact, you might
even be president twice.
- [audience cheering, applauding]
- Anyway, we got ourselves--
We do have a two-tiered system of justice.
And we’re gonna talk to someone who’s
actually been a victim of this system,
and someone who can verify what’s broken.
Please welcome Melissa Murray,
a legal scholar and law professor at NYU
and an MSNBC/NBC News contributor.
And Jay Jordan,
CEO of Alliance for Safety and Justice
and National Director
of the TimeDone campaign,
which organizes people
with past conviction records
to eliminate the barriers
blocking them from success.
Guys, welcome to the program.
[audience cheers, applauds]
Jay, I’m gonna talk to you first.
- Uh, you’ve been in the system.
- Yeah.
You have spent time in jail.
When you were arraigned,
did you pick the Zoom option?
And did you go with the optional-mug-shot,
no-handcuffs approach,
or did you say,
"I want the traditional experience"?
[chuckles]
Um, you know,
- I laugh but it’s quite serious
- [Stewart] Yes.
what happens
when people get arrested in this country.
Especially if you are, uh, poor.
Uh, if you don’t have the means
to, um, turn yourself in.
Um, and that’s the vast majority of people
that get arrested in this country.
- Three out of four people
- Yeah.
that are currently incarcerated
live right by or below
the supplemental poverty line.
So we’re literally talking
about poor folks
that are getting swept up in the system.
When I got arrested, they came with dogs.
I got tased right in front
of my two-year-old nephew.
Like, people are getting brutalized
when they get arrested.
I remember my first time getting arrested
was stealing a bottle of Hennessy, right?
I was 15 years old. 15 years old. Fifteen.
We’re in a car, we’re drinking.
Police pull behind us,
we get yanked out of the car.
And there’s a phrase that everybody knows
who’ve been brutalized by the police.
Everybody knows this phrase.
- It’s "quit resisting."
- [Stewart] Right.
And when they say that,
they know that is a green light
- to brutalize you.
- [Stewart] Right.
That was my first instance
of getting arrested.
Fifteen years old, for a bottle of
Hennessy, getting beat up by the cops.
So, you know, no--
When you see that--
When you watch somebody
and they say, like, "Well, you know,
if you had just taken money
from your charitable foundation
and bought the Hennessy,
and pretended that it was an expense
for there,
everything would be fucking fine."
Like, that must be infuriating.
I mean, how the great
Bryan Stevenson puts it,
"In this country,
if you are wealthy and guilty,
you’re treated better
than if you’re poor and innocent."
We do have two different
systems of justice.
One for those who are poor
and those with resources.
And it’s very different.
We’re seeing that play out right now.
I think a big part of the sort of playing
down of these charges that we’ve seen
is what the media has done.
I mean, I think they were expecting
something explosive. And not really--
- But they created that expectation.
- For sure, for sure.
I mean, they were hoping for a perp walk
and maybe an orange jumpsuit.
But this is a process, right?
There’s an arraignment,
and this was just the first act
of what will be a very long
and drawn-out process.
But to their point though,
this is unprecedented to some degree
because of who Donald Trump is.
He is a former president.
And, you know, I’m a law professor.
- We don’t lead very exciting lives, but--
- Stop it.
I mean, this is the most fun
I’ve had in a while.
- What?
- [audience laughs]
We have a long haul to go.
We don’t know
what evidence Alvin Bragg has.
We don’t know
whether these charges are thin
because we don’t know
what’s underlying them.
And so to say,
"It’s a weak case," it’s this or that,
we don’t know that. They don’t know that.
None of those people
have been to law school, and I know that.
[Stewart, audience laughing]
Well, that must be frustrating too.
[audience applauds]
So, you know, after this,
the process is, you know,
-"We’ll see what the evidence is," right?
- [Stewart] Mm-hmm.
The problem with everybody else
in the system,
which is 97% of people take a plea deal--
Most people who take a plea deal
never see the evidence against them.
Never see the evidence against them.
- [Stewart] Is that--
- Ever.
- That’s true?
- That is true.
They never see the evidence,
so they’re taking plea deals.
I’m gonna tell you why, right?
Like, so when you are arrested,
there-- there are two main factors
in our current system
that dictates the severity of your stay
and the length of your stay.
And it is if you can make bail
and if you can buy yourself an attorney.
If you can’t do those two things,
you’re getting a public defender
who are overworked and underpaid
- Right. Toughest job of all.
- have dozens of people on their caseload.
- Toughest job in law.
- Toughest job on the beat.
So you take the deal, you don’t see
the evidence-- and get this--
They don’t have to tell you about
the collateral consequences you face
after you take the deal.
So the 97% of people
that are taking these deals
don’t even know that they’re gonna face
40,000 legal restrictions
after they serve their time.
How is that ok-- How is that legal?
Well, so, first of all,
the entire legal system--
[Stewart] I don’t mean to look at you
like, "You created this system!"
- [audience laughing]
- Melissa?
I just work here.
- Um--
- [Stewart] It really is.
In-- As a general matter on both
the civil side and the criminal side,
most cases end with a settlement,
whether that is on the civil side
an actual settlement between the parties.
And we learned a lot about
that during the #MeToo era
with nondisclosure agreements
and settlement of certain cases.
But on the criminal side,
the settlement is the plea deal.
And if you are poor,
if you don’t have money for bail,
if you are worried about your job,
and they’re offering you a misdemeanor--
that may have collateral consequences
- [Jordan] Yeah.
- that you don’t know about.
But a misdemeanor as opposed to jail time,
you might just take it
and get railroaded into this and th--
[Stewart] You have no recourse.
- I mean, that’s-- that’s part of it.
- No, you don’t.
And is that the shock that
we’re seeing in this system?
This idea that, "Oh, my God,
he’s gonna have to face consequences."
For sure. I mean, again, this is a man
who is no stranger to
legal liability, both civil--
Um, he hasn’t had
criminal liability against him.
Now it looks like not only may he have
criminal exposure in this case,
but there may also be other cases
both at the state level in Georgia
- and at the federal level that--
- But he only hasn’t had criminal exposure
- because of his resources.
- No-- Undoubtedly.
A normal person who committed those things
- would have criminal exposure.
- Un-Undoubt--
And even now, his treatment
in the legal system
reflects the incredible privileges
that he does have.
Jay, there’s gotta be a ray of lightness,
and you-- you know,
in getting to know you a little bit here--
I am shocked by what you went through
and your resilience to that.
Is there a light here
that we can learn from?
- Is there something to take from this?
- Two points.
So I wanna make a point
about the system itself
and what we’re up against,
and then what we can actually do, right?
Or give people a green light
to do something.
So this judicial bureaucracy, right?
- [Stewart] Mm-hmm.
- Just to give everybody
a sense of what we have been able to build
or allow being built under our watch.
Since 1985-- my entire life-- we’ve spent
$11 trillion building this system.
Eleven trillion dollars. That’s four times
what we spent in Syria and Iraq.
We are talking about
a nation-building strategy
that has forced America
to become the largest jailor, point one.
Point two, right,
that it is the second-largest
employer in the world.
- Department of Defense, first.
- What?
The American judicial bureaucracy, second,
Walmart, third, right?
- That’s how big it is.
- What?
Yes, that’s how big it is.
Employs 2.5 million people.
Right? A lot of people are tied to this.
Three, they-- they spend 300 million--
$300 billion every single year.
Three hundred billion dollars
every single year.
And they have
these associations and lobbyists.
I’ve been against these
lobbyists in the state houses.
They show up in their Armani suits
smelling like a Macy’s counter,
- and they’re scary. Right?
- [chuckling]
- So it’s-- it’s a protective shield
- [Stewart] Mm-hmm.
that we’re talking about,
and it focuses on poor people.
Again, three out of four people
that get sucked up in the system
are living below
the supplemental poverty line.
Like, poor people to the justice system
is like Big Macs to McDonald’s.
It is a system, and it-- and it works,
and we don’t have
a [stammers] effective justice system.
We trade justice for judicial efficiency.
- But let me tell you this--
- I’m hoping there’s a "but" in here, Jay.
- [Jordan] I can tell you here--
- Because right now,
I’m just feeling like, "Oh, God."
I am hopeful for all the people out there
that are like,
"We can do something about it."
So we always get turned
around when we say,
"Well, I want to abolish the system
or reform the system
or transform the system,"
and you’re like, "Oh, you’re too woke,"
or "That’s too progressive," right?
Well, let me tell you something,
in the Declaration of Independence--
In the Declaration of Independence
of this country,
we stop reading when it says,
"Life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness."
But what [stammers] say--
What they say after that gives me hope.
It says that any moment in time
that government becomes destructive to us
means it is the right of
the people to abolish or alter it
and create a new system of government.
So if you’re talking about
abolition or reform,
it is not that you’re too woke,
it’s you’re patriotic.
So please take up, you know
- [stammers] a legal appeal--
- [exclaims] Yeah! Come on!
[stammers] Become a lobbyist,
- become a law professor--
- Jay Jordan!
Become an organizer because we need--
That’s the only way
we’re gonna get through this.
- I needed that!
- [audience laughs]
That was like a Jamba Juice. Yes!
[audience laughs]
- Thank you, both
- [chuckles]
for being here and-and for giving us,
uh, your-- your wisdom, your analysis
and most importantly, your perspective.
Uh, thank you very much.
Jay Jordan. Melissa Murray.
- [audience applauding]
- Uh, thank you both.
All right, everybody, that is our show.
Uh, get your frequent viewer cards
punched before you leave.
If you want more content there,
head to our website.
Uh, Elon just turned it
into a Doge website.
[audience laughing]
You’ll love it.
Uh, I also got a podcast there
that I record from the lighthouse
that I call my home.
All right, we’re ending tonight
with one final "for fuck’s sake."
[Jake Tapper] I’m gonna interrupt you
- for one second--
- [guest] I think--
[Tapper] I’m gonna interrupt
you because this is
one of the photographs that we just got.
The photograph is stark, and--
and historic as we look at it.
Donald Trump, uh, with a--
I don’t know how to characterize his face,
but certainly a serious expression
on his face. Uh--
[audience laughing]
[Tapper] Alyssa Farah Griffin,
is she-- is she with us?
If she is, I-I’d love her to weigh in
on what she sees
in this-- in this picture.
[Griffin] Jake. I mean, that-- that--
that’s a man who looks like a defendant.
[audience laughing]