Jon Stewart says Trump is 'exposing' corruption in US political system

Daily Show host Jon Stewart spoke to Chief Washington correspondent for the New Yorker magazine Jane Mayer and said that Trump is doing a service to help expose corruption and "a reality of crony capitalism" with the government.  

The comments came as the two discussed Trump's conviction in New York City trial over 34 counts of the falsification of business records. "I’m not saying he’s not exploiting it, but isn’t he exposing at some level a reality of crony capitalism, a reality of transactional corruption that is the heartbeat of corporate and political America?" Stewart asked Mayer.  

"What I’ve seen is the money has become bigger and bigger and bigger, and it is corrupting the government, but it wasn’t always this way. It’s not the whole story," Mayer responded. "There are incredible numbers of people in Washington who are really dedicated to doing the right thing for the right reasons, both Republicans and Democrats." 

Stewart argued that even though there are good people in Washington, Trump has helped to expose "vulnerabilities" in the system of government in Washington.

"He’s identifying though a dissatisfaction, and two things can be true. One is there are a lot of really good, dedicated policy people and good-hearted with great integrity people working in Washington every day to make the country work better," Stewart added. "And number two is the system is so removed from the needs of its people and so insulated and isolated within the Beltway and within that very peculiar system within the Beltway, that it can’t actually accomplish the goal even those good-hearted people of integrity want it to." 

Stewart added that the system should be "reversed engineered" in order to fix it. Stewart, however, did not give Trump all the credit, adding, "Now he’s not doing it for our benefit, he’s doing it to exploit it. But what I’m saying is, what if we take the information that he’s delivering us which is, here are the vulnerabilities in your system that I can exploit, can’t we reverse engineer that?" 

Stewart has been a long-time critic of Trump as well as a left-wing political talk show host. He has defended sex change interventions being used on minors. After he criticized Trump over the charges brought against the 45th president by New York Attorney General Letitia James that centered around Trump overvaluing his real estate, Stewart was found to have taken similar actions on his NYC apartment.