The Problem With Jon Stewart - Trump’s Domination Politics, at Home and Abroad with Fareed Zakaria

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

As the Trump administration continues to operate with unchecked power, Jon is joined by Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN’s "Fareed Zakaria GPS." Together, they explore how Trump has flouted the rule of law at home and abroad, investigate how his approach to Venezuela and international relations fits into his unifying theory of power, and discuss where this philosophy might ultimately lead. Plus, Jon talks Clintons & Epstein, Daily Show vs. Weekly Show, and joining Instagram! This podcast episode is brought to you by: BILT - Join the loyalty program for renters at https://joinbilt.com/tws. ROCKET MONEY - Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join at https://RocketMoney.com/TWS. QUINCE - Refresh your winter wardrobe with Quince. Go to https://Quince.com/TWS for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. MINT MOBILE - Plans start at $15/month at https://mintmobile.com/tws Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast> TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod   > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic  Producer – Gillian Spear Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello. Welcome back to the weekly show podcast for John Stewart. My name is John Stewart, and we have been gone. God knows how long we've been gone. I can tell you how long we've been gone. I'm back at my podcasting desk, and there are, it would appear to be three dead insects. You would think that I would have come up here and clear those out. But I took a nice break.

But boy, did the world not. There is so much going on that is, that is disposed. and needing of framing, and I'm delighted to have Fareed Zakaria is going to be joining us on the show. You know, so much of this is about what exactly is the theory of power for this Trump administration? Is there anything that we can figure out that kind of gives us a coherent directional world view as to where these guys are going? Or is it just literally big, fuck, small? I think it's more complicated than that. How does Iran and Venezuela fit into all that?

You know, all these different things, we will try and run through and get some through line that could maybe help us feel slightly less vertigo from what we feel from the bouncing around between we are going to invade Greenland. And also, is that delicious oil? I think I'm going to have to take over your country and drill it. So I'm going to have to talk to this fella used to come on, the old Daily Show, Const. and I haven't been able to talk to him in quite a bit, so I'm delighted to have him on the program today. Mr. Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN's Freed Zakaria GPS. And so, folks, in a world that has so many now plates spinning in the air

and a constant stream of what appear to be really close to cataclysmic events and catastrophes, We bring in a gentleman who's been doing his program, keeping an eye on all this sort of thing for 18 years now. Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria, GPS. And as we spoke earlier, you were the most frequent guest that we had on the Daily Show back when I still had to work every night, which God bless. You figured that early on, Farid, didn't you?

Well, it was a huge pleasure. Honestly, you asked me to do it when I was very young, and it was based on my first book, actually, which was all about illiberal democracy. Democracies where elected rulers start to abuse, elected leaders, start to abuse the rule of law and, you know, individual rights. In those days, I was talking about places like Pakistan and the Philippines, not the United States of America. And it was a huge pleasure. And, of course, it leaves me wondering, you know, what happened, John? What am I chopped liver?

Why have you forgotten me? Oh, let me tell you what happens. So I disappear for nine years, raised a couple of kids. And then I decided to come back once a week. I don't have time for any guess. Somebody shows up in the album. You've got to see you. Now you've got to look young and hip.

And like I'm, you know, I'm old news. I don't. Somehow I think this face, you know, I'm ready to play Tevia in Fiddler. I mean, with this face. You'd be good. None of this is working. Farid, what a great way to jump into it, which is, you know, you make your bones on this idea of

illiberal democracies and all the ways in which these more authoritarian rulers use the mechanisms of democracy to create systems that are actually eroding it and corroding it and the infrastructure of it to the point of somewhat of a collapse. And you jumped my first question, which is, Are you seeing now the things that you viewed in Philippines, and I don't want to be, you know, alarmist or hyperbolic, but boy, it's hard not to view this country as, you know, the polite way to would be, I guess, we are now a subsidiary of the Trump organization, which would look at it more benignly. And the less benign way would be they've been using these illiberal techniques in test kitchens in the, Philippines and all kinds of other places. And now they've brought this new McRib to the United States and they're applying it here. Look, there's no question that that's true. When I was writing about

it, when I coined the phrase, illiberal democracy in 96, 97, I was looking at places like Pakistan, the Philippines, Slovakia, Turkey under Erdogan, you could begin to see it happening. And I always thought that this is not going to affect the developed world as much. I did actually in my book have a chapter or two about America, but I thought it was sort of like a tendency, a danger that we were becoming too enamored of the idea of these charismatic leaders. But what I didn't expect is that the institutional framework of Western democracies would be as fragile as it is.

And in this case, actually, the United States is in worse shape than other places. So if you look at in Europe, explain that. We're in worse shape than places like Pakistan and Slovakia and Turkey. No, no, no, no, more than in places like in Europe. So look at Georgia Maloney comes to power in Italy and she's a fire-breathing, right-wing populist. But she's contained by the institutions. Her policies have actually not been as radical as people. thought they would be, partly because there are lots of institutions, both within Italy and within

the European Union, and she's basically not torn them up. In the United States, you know, we have the oldest constitution in the world, which is great in many ways, but in some ways it's kind of old-fashioned. So, for example, our Justice Department does technically sit entirely under the president. That is not true in Europe. All their justice departments are independent agencies. So what that means is that what we developed after Watergate was a set of norms. You know, the president wouldn't ask the attorney general to prosecute certain cases. But those are all just norms that we developed after Watergate. And Trump just broke them all. And he just said, look, there's no law that tells me I can't do this. Similarly, he's correct when he says, there's no law that says, my kids can't do all the business they want.

and take advantage of the fact that they're my children. And all these things were norms. And what it's turned out is that we need more actual laws that constrain executive power in particular. And the challenge here is the Supreme Court has become so pro-executive power that I think we're in a very bad fix because you can see the problem, as you described it. the, you know, the Trump presidency is basically knocking down norms, in many cases, violating laws. The TikTok ban should have been implemented. It was a congressional ban. That was a law.

Congress made it a law. And he's done recisions. He's pulled money back. So that's my question to you, because we talk a lot about how Trump has blown past norms or, you know, let's say Maloney goes into Italy, but she's more constrained. But I think what Trump is demonstrating is that even these laws, it's. not so much that the system has been constraining individuals, is that the individuals themselves believed in that system as being the most viable and most stable and most productive. It would be the most prosperous. It's one of the reasons why America has done so well is because by laying out

rules of the road and adhering to it, we've earned credibility and trust that we weren't going to be ruled by the whims of mercurial. and volatile leaders. Trump, I think, has made a different choice. I think he's shown the weakness of liberal democracies, almost not in norms, but by the idea that if you control, what did he say about the Supreme Court?

When the Supreme Court came in and said, you can't do that, and what was his response? How are you going to enforce that? Right. So it's not, I think Trump is actually, it's worse than, oh, he's blowing past. It's why I wasn't so bothered by, oh, he fired some inspector generals. When he blew past norms, I kind of soft peddled it.

This is a different thing that is now being accomplished. This isn't about norms. It's exposing the weakness of the enforcement mechanisms of the laws that a powerful executive just decides to ignore. Yeah, and that is in some ways at the heart of the problem of the American Constitution. Because I would argue that one of the things

that the founders really could not have imagined was these political parties that are so loyal to the party and to the president as the head of the party that they completely abdicate their institutional loyalty to Congress. So Madison always, is believed that congressional power would always be a check on executive power because Congress

wants to retain its own self-interested, you know, for self-interested reasons, retain power. No, Mike Johnson is happy to be the errand boy to Donald Trump. Of course. Because at the end of the day, he knows that the way he's going to stay in power and get elected is by being Donald Trump's errand boy. So if you have a system like that, you actually don't have the checks and balances. The checks and balances are completely notional. Or similarly, as you point out, with the court,

I think what Trump is doing, for example, on the tariff case, is a fascinating use, again, of this kind of illiberal democracy because he's intimidating the court and saying, we're doing this for national security, we're getting tons of revenue. All these deals have been done. You'll undo the whole reputation and a set of relationships and deals I have made.

Well, yes, particularly. But what you did was plainly unconstitutional. I mean, literally it is in the Constitution, in a line, not by implication or inference. There is a line that says foreign commerce will be regulated by Congress. Tariffs were, you know, were regulated by, by, by, by, by the way, they knew what tariffs were. This wasn't, you know, the reason we had the American Revolution was tariffs. You know, when people talk about the Tea Party, you know, what was that?

That was a tariff on. which they called a tax and a tariff interchangeable on P coming in from Britain. Which of course was, the tariff was paid by Britain and not the American people. And it raised so much money and we were so powerful. But by the way, that means the whole American Revolution was a misunderstanding.

If only we had realized that we were, that we in America were not paying the tariffs, it was the poor Brits who were paying it. Why did we vote? That's right. It was making us, it was making America great again, again. But the thing that it is not hard for me to foresee a world that even if the Supreme Court says those tariffs are unconstitutional, that he will not get rid of them or Congress, which is now a vestigial organ, will just say, or they may do a different thing and say, okay, they have, certainly they control the Senate and they control the House and they could pass them if they wanted to, but they abdicate responsibility because they don't want to go on record for anything. I don't think he'll do it, John, because I think if your inspector's general point is an interesting one,

so, you know, he comes in for day one, he fires all the inspectors general. Now, congressional law allows the president to fire the inspectors general, but there's a procedure in the law, which is, you have to give six months notice. They didn't file a procedure. There has to be a specific charge of complaints against each inspector general, and he fired them all without cause. I think that for Trump and for the people around him, and I think this is very much part of the Heritage 2025 project, it is important as an act of principle to violate these laws because they believe these laws are incorrectly constraining executive power. So I think what Trump will do is he will deliberately not go to Congress to get congressional authorization because he wants to make the point,

I as president am going to retain the right to do this. And it will be some made-up jumble of emergency, national security. You know, lawyers can argue anything. And he'll come up with, but if you look at the way in which he handles, the recitions, as you said, it's absolutely clear that you can't just stop spending money that Congress gave. But they wanted to do it. Right?

Because they want to make the point that we think all these constraints are bullshit. We, in the executive branch, can do whatever we want. What I'm puzzled by is do the Republicans going along with this not? realize that one day there will be a Democratic president. But I think what they believe is that, because you will find that Congress suddenly grows a spine again when a Democrat takes office, I think what they're not understanding, and maybe they think of the Democratic president won't push this to the extent that he does, is that final step to that, which is, and what we were talking about earlier, which is you and what army

motherfucker? Right, right. How are you going to enforce this? And that's where I think the line is being drawn in the most dangerous place. It's the Andrew Jackson line. You remember when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Sioux Indians who were being displaced. Or Cherokee. Yeah.

And Andrew Jackson is supposed to have said, you know, Justice Marshall has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it. That's exactly right. And Stephen Miller has made this case explicitly. You know, he's gone out and he does that. You know, whenever he talks, I always imagine like dark. clouds start to arise over there and like the theme from the exorcist starts playing but uh you know his point is hey we see the world as it is and the world belongs to the strong and the strong and

this gets to and i want to talk about it it's a more generalized theory of power because right now they're trying to find a coherent governing philosophy that they can sell the you know the don row doctrine or these different things. We're going to strengthen our hemisphere and that's what makes America great and all these different things. What I believe they have decided is kind of a more old school theory of power, which is coerced compliance is ultimately better than alliance. that common cause alliance will not get America the prosperous future

that coerced compliance will get us and you see it everywhere we're going to get Greenland or we're going to do it the nice way or we're going to do it the hard way

so even if he strikes a deal to buy it or to do these other things it is obviously at the point of a gun I don't think and you know we'll tie this all together

because I have something I want to ask you about in terms of Iran and Venezuela with all of that. But would you say that the bet they are making is that one, that we want to take the world back to those systems where Mike makes right, if you have the larger Navy, you get to take it, and just blindly ignoring how volatile and violent and ultimately unsustainable that kind of world was. Absolutely. Hey, folks, we got a new one here.

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Paying rent, it's better when you use built. And soon owning a home is going to be better with built as well. Join the low-o-o-o-o-o-a-te program for renters at joinbilt.com slash T-WS. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-T dot com slash T-WS. Make sure to use our URL so they know we say it. So, I mean, most people I don't realize what a sharp break it took place in international relations after 1945. If you look at the 100 years before 1945, you see, you know, every two years there's a war of conquest, there's aggression, there's annexation, there's annexation, there's annexation. You know, I mean, France and Germany went to war three times between 1850 and 1945, right?

Twice they dragged the whole world into it. The shift then from 1945 to this rules-based international system, you know, the United States, basically it was Franklin Roosevelt's dream, Harry Truman implements it. And what you have since then is remarkable. It's there's almost no war of conquest that is taking place. There's almost no annexations. There's almost no annexations. There are almost none of that has taken place. Of course, there have been violence and conflicts, but it's a remarkable break. And why did it happen? It's because the United States conceived off a system that was not this traditional real polity law of the jungle.

It was, you know, let's try to create a world in which everyone has an incentive for peace. Let's create an open economy so everyone can grow and prosper. And they have this much more dark, you know, Mach's politics. It's like the 19th century German view of how to be powerful. And the only thing I would point out is didn't do so well for the Germans. But that's for read, America created that world 80 years ago. Now, that world wasn't perfect. And it certainly mistakes were made in terms of how liberalized globalization was and how you balanced your industry with other things. But it was remarkably

successful. But in their vision, that world, the 80 years post-World War II were the suckers bet for the United States, that we are the victims. First of all, that we are the victims of that. We were the most prosperous country out of anybody during that time. And remain the most prosperous. And remain the most prosperous. But the second thing is, we fucking created it. That was our design. And they're acting like that is the world that was created to take advantage of us. Right. Trump says the European Union was created to screw the United States.

We basically encouraged the Europeans to come together because we didn't want them to fight wars again. We thought that they would understand the advantages of commerce, and it worked brilliantly. But the point you make, John, which is very important, is the whole mega premise is that the United States has gotten screwed over the last 80 years. and particularly the last 30 or 40, right?

Here's the data. About 25 years ago, U.S. and European wages were roughly the same. Today, U.S. wages are 50% higher than European wages. About 15 years ago, the Eurozone economy and the U.S. economy were the same size. Today, the U.S. economy is 70% larger than the Eurozone economy. If you look at one company, Invidia, it has a higher market capitalization than the investment.

entire German stock exchange. So it's like, what world are you talking about? The United States is more dominant today than it has ever been. You know, we have some issues with inequality and things like that, but those are issues of redistribution. How do we organize and divide the pie? Right, but not of prospering. We've created more wealth. And we've got the dollar underpinning the world. So the fundamental, you know, to me, the fascinating thing is that The whole vision is premised on decline, decay, sclerosis. Even the Venezuela thing, you know, as you say, what they want to do is go from being the global hegemon that set the rules that created the system, that maintains the system,

to like a regional bully. You know, we give up to Putin, Ukraine, we give up Asia to China, and we get to boss over Venezuela and Mexico. Isn't that great? And it's like such a shrinking of American power. And it also, what it says is this administration believes we will be more prosperous, having total dominance and a more colonial view of South America and kind of removing Europe and what we gain from that alliance.

And even the ridiculousness of, you know, we need to take over Greenland so that Russia and China don't take over Greenland. You're like, isn't that what NATO is for? We formed an alliance with, it's like saying we will fight alone to control South America instead of fighting with all of our allies to have a mutually beneficial position in the entire world. And how is that more prosperous for us? Think about the difference, you know, as you say, you put it right, They think coerced compliance is better than the kind of messiness of this alliance between democracies. Because it's zero sum. They have to have a zero sum.

So look at the coerced compliance. So China, we have something like 50 free allies in the United States. And most of them are the richest countries in the world, you know, the Europeans, Japan, Australia. China has one freebie ally, North Korea. Let's throw in Russia That's really true Yeah, that is the only treaty ally they have I thought they had trade treaty allies though

They do have But not defense You know what I mean they like to be I mean you know And let's throw in Russia And let's throw in Iran Right, right Think of that

Like they've got three We've got 50 Right And we want to give that up We want to piss them off So that we can have Greenland Which we already have Basically we have base there

we could put more bases there, we could talk. It's as though they don't want, they think that alliances are weak. It's better for them. It's the same thing they're doing with immigration in the United States. Rather than trying to, are they really trying to tell Americans that the best way to get criminal, undocumented people in this country, out of this country is to show up in force, at a target wearing masks with guns. They want that feeling of boot on the neck.

It's for some reason that the goals that they want are so much more easily accomplished if they didn't have that sense of and we must dominate and humiliate you if you are our foe, including if you didn't vote for him. Yeah. The theater is very important. As you well know,

Obama has probably still deported more people than Trump. In other words, if you look at it month to month. But they did that. It was a different, they did do it at the border. Exactly. And they did it in a very different way. But that's my point, which is in one case, they were almost trying to minimize the theater and maximize the effectiveness.

In this case, they're actually trying to maximize the effectiveness, even if they, you know, the numbers aren't what they want to show that this is what we are doing. Right. Right. I also think back to your Greenland point, it's a very important thing to understand that their view of wealth and economic growth is weirdly old-fashioned. So they think, you know, like, Greenland has minerals in the ground. It has all this stuff. You can always buy them. You can always lease them. You can always like, you know, the idea that the country that has minerals underneath its soil is going to be richest, creases. If that were true, all of Africa would be rich. Think about Israel, South Korea. It is a colonial mindset.

Yeah, these countries have nothing. And what do they have? They have smart people. You can always buy this stuff from around the world. Think about the oil revolution in America. The Chinese kept going around Africa and trying to lock up oil and natural gas deals. The U.S. did technological innovation and invented fracking. And it turned out ours was a much more successful thing because it's fundamentally knowledge-driven.

There's, they've got to make corrupt deals with, you know, African dictators. In a weird way, Trump is more like that Chinese mentality, you know. Let's find, you know, that's why he loves the Venezuela case. And a colonial mentality. It is a king's mentality. And the strange thing about it to me is think about the damage you do to our world standing by going in and taking the resources from Venezuela to get more oil, right? Who's the largest oil producer in the world?

It's us. It's already us. So to do that, but what are we doing when we push that? We're sending a message to the world that if you're, you know, it's sort of like the old picky blinders thing, big, fuck small. If you're big, you can do this. So here's what we may be trading off. We get to take a bigger cut of Venezuelan oil and China.

China looks that and goes, oh, well, then I guess we get to take a cut of quantum chips in Taiwan. And what do you think is going to be more important in the modern world? What are we, what's the tradeoff for us, Farid? Yeah. I mean, one way to think about what they're doing here is, you know, for Trump, it's clear, it's clear. I just read this book, The Gods of New York, which is the New York in the 80s.

You drive it actually is a really fascinating. It's when I moved there. And Trump is a huge character in it. And you can look, even then, every time he did a deal, his absolute imperative was, how do I squeeze everybody in every possible way to screw them and get the best deal I can for myself? There was never a thought about, instead of a transaction, how do I build a relationship? And any really great businessman will tell you, businesses are built not on a single transaction, on building a relationship.

And he burns bridges like nobody's burned bridges before. And this is what he's doing. And with this, in each of these tariff negotiations, his point is, I'm going to screw you, I'm going to squeeze you, I'm going to get that. And there's something sort of strange about not realizing that American power since 1945 has been built on this unique thing

that we have built so much goodwill and trust among the richest countries in the world. International relations theorists all predicted that at some point, Germany will go nuclear, Japan will go nuclear. They're too rich, they're too powerful to allow their foreign and defense policy to be subcontracted to the United States. But it never happened. And it never happened because we were honorable about saying, we're taking everyone's interests into account. And as you say, we made mistakes and all that. But compared to other great powers that dominated the world, you know, the United States has been remarkable in having this enlightened self-interest.

And it took 80 years to build that level of trust. And my great fear is that, as you say, four kind of almost misguided notions of economic wealth. We're squandering it because what are we going to get? First of all, the Venezuelan oil is a bit of a mirage. And most people don't realize they talk about Venezuela are having the largest oil reserves in the world, 300 million. You know where that number comes from?

Hugo Chavez one day crippled the estimate of Venezuela. Chavez is a bit like Trump, that, where he likes big numbers. It's also apparently not the type of grade of oil that's easily got, it's much cheaper. It's not something that even the oil company, you're like, I don't know about that stuff. Yeah, yeah. I love the classifications. The stuff we produce is called Light Sweet. And this is heavy crude.

Who wants that? But also, they are right now, they're exporting 1% of the world's petroleum. They're 21st. So, you know, they're going to be able to do more. But the whole idea of some gold mine, which is why the CEO of Exxon, you know, in front of the television camera, Stelstrom, Venezuela is currently uninvestable, which means if you want us to invest, the U.S. government is going to have to give us guarantees. You know, this is the new form of capitalism that we're embracing. And you saw Trump's

response to that was everybody wants to be a part of it, but I think I'm going to cut Exxon out of it because they were to glib with their answer. And what I don't understand about the MAGA movement or the Republicans right now is that somehow they believe as poorly as maybe some of our institutions had performed over time and the kind of reform that they needed in the very things, is that replacing that with the whims of a mercurial, megalomaniac and malignant narcissists is the key to a more stable and prosperous American future. Rocket money. You still paying that only fan subscription you told your wife you'd cancel? I feel you. No, you need rocket money. You're paying for subscriptions. You don't even remember signing up for. Rocket money is a personal

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Maga is steeped in kind of the mythology of American creation, and they're really going in hard on it. J.D. Vant says, you know, the heritage American is really the most important American. They have more say in this land, we're not a creed. We're a people, right? But the Constitution very clearly says, no, I think we're actually a creed. And that creed is that the consent of the governed, that we are given unalienable rights by a creator, and those rights carry weight in whatever governing system that we place in there.

And this is the thing they fetishize. They put it on their buses and they don't tread on me and they've got the Gads and flags and all that. they're clearly though giving fealty to someone operating utterly outside of that system but here's where I think it really gets interesting other countries we exported that people want to govern themselves and when you go in and you start to exploit their resources and do it explicitly so or say what you unleash in the people that you are exploiting is a cycle that we have seen play out numerously through history. And I'll use Iran and Venezuela as the example. It's a 70-year cycle. In Iran, think of this as the Lion King. It's the cycle of life for Reid. So in Venezuela,

we just started the cycle. We cooed the leader. We arrested him, whether that's justified or not, we'll save that for a different day. We're going to go in and we're going to take their oil. People would say like, oh, Americans don't want that. That's like Iraq. It's not like Iraq. It's like Iran. In 1953, we and British Petroleum did the same thing in Iran.

Mosecique, we removed him. And what did we do? We replaced him with a pro-Western leader. And we got all those resources. And how long did that system hold up for? 1979 because the resentments that we created within that region exploded into it's the reason that the mullahs were in power in 79 and now the mullahs rule with their iron fist and now they're in the cycle where they're about to turn over that country and what's going to happen then my guess is

the western powers or somebody's going to come in and install somebody else and the cycle how do we not see that. How do we not see that what we are starting in Venezuela is going to sow the seeds for the volatility and danger that we had already sowed in Iran in 1953? We're just repeating the same stupid cycle. You know, for the United States, for America, it's always been very hard to understand other people's nationalism. In other words, we are very proud nationalist patriots, right? But then when you go to Vietnam and they're like, we want our country, we just don't understand that. We're like, no, no, no, we are going to give you a better system.

You know, we go to Iraq and they're like, get out of here. We're going to, and we say, no, no, no, well, you don't understand. We're going to have a, we're going to set up a wonderful democracy with the Shias and the Sunnis will live together. And I actually, as an immigrant, I think we do mean well in many of these cases, but we have no, we seem to have no understanding that other people, have nationalism too. Other people, you know, there's this famous moment. It may have been apocry when Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, is talking to Gandhi. You know I love a good Mountbatten anecdote. Throw it my way.

Yeah. And he says, Mr. Gandhi, if the British just leave India, it's going to be chaos. And Gandhi looks at him and says, yes, but it'll be our chaos. And that's what I think most people don't understand sometimes. People prefer their own chaos to a foreign imposed peace, a foreign imposed order. And what Trump is doing is actually igniting nationalism and anti-American nationalism in places that have really never had it, like Canada, like Denmark, you know, like the Nordic countries, like Sweden. I mean, I'm talking to these people. And there you can feel that underneath they're trying to be polite, there is. a deep resentment at the way they are being treated. And what are we doing this for? I mean, that's

to me the most bizarre part. We're creating all these enemies out of allies for what? For like the notional idea that we'll have more bases on Greenland, which we could have had anyway. I think it's the kind of thing. And I, you know, nationalism is, there's so many connotations about that that some people, you know, view differently. I think what we're missing is, which is so strange again because of how much we just lionize our own origin story. People yearn to breathe free. Self-determination is inherent in the human condition. And I don't understand how we believe that so deeply in our bones for our story.

and yet somehow think Venezuelans don't feel the same about themselves. They may not like the Chavezza, they may not like Maduro, that election may have been screwed, but they want the ability to determine their own future, not this paternalizing. We would never accept it.

Yeah, and in fact, even in Venezuela, I think it's important for people to understand Chavez was hugely popular. He won the first election. Well, that's the difference between him and Trump. These populist movements. And the truth is, there are a lot of people who still believe in Chavez and believe. So, you know, that's one of the reasons why this could get very, if they actually try a regime change, this would be very complicated.

Because there are still, first of all, a lot of people with guns who are not going to give up power easily. But there are also a lot of believing, you know, Chavez followers. And then there's drug traffickers in Cartagena. So the whole thing is much more complicated, which is why the sad truth is this is probably going to look like essentially the most expensive arrest in human history of Maduro, which got rid of him, got American oil companies, some concessions into Venezuela, and left everything else intact. The entire repressive apparatus of the regime, the defense minister, the interior minister, will all stay exactly as they are because otherwise you're opening a pandera's box. And we're jumping into one of the things that creates such instability in South America and Central America is our interventions, right, into their politics is what created a lot of

these more extreme left-wing movements, right? So now they bounce back and forth between right-wing authoritarian strongmen and left-wing authoritarian strongmen. And the thing that prevented that type of pendulum swings, which is the type of thing you see in like Pakistan, where it'll go from a military junta to, you know, a corrupt kind of democracy to back. It's kind of that cycle. So what prevents that is our system of constitutional checks and balances. And what we're saying is we'd like to throw that out to get a system more like theirs. They're setting the United States up for that. So the really interesting question, John, that I would put to you is, you know,

if you assume all the things we're saying are true, the part that's most difficult to understand for me is why our Americans, or at least 40 to 50 percent of Americans, okay with this. You have a situation where it's absolutely clear that, you know, that one party was a party that the president right now is accumulating powers on a scale that no precedent has done, you know, in decades, maybe ever. You have a, you have a situation where laws are being violated, norms are being violated. You know, you have a situation where he's intimidating the court, intimidating the Federal Reserve, and yet, you know, he doesn't lose much support from his base. And I think he's decided he's governing for his base. And so what it leaves me thinking is, is about half the

country really okay with illiberal democracy, with the idea that, you know, it's okay to abuse individual rights, minority rights, separation of powers, all that. And what does that mean for the future of democracy? If half the country doesn't really believe in liberal democracy. No, they believe in it's okay if it's our guy. You know, look, this is all very Lord of the Rings, you know, but it is, you know, everybody believes in liberal democracy until they get to hold the ring. And then suddenly, it's a very different scenario. And to be fair, and to be fair, the left has also done this sometimes. Of course, but not nearly to the extent. Not nearly. There's no, yeah, there's no both sides. But it always worried me when Biden would do these student loan, you know,

waivers using executive power. Like, you know, that stuff, like just because you want the outcome, you cannot want the outcome so badly that you violate the processes of liberal democracy. Like, that's the whole point of liberalism and liberal democracy, which is the process is very important. You don't get to just make your policy happen any which way. And what Trump is showing you is the real cost of that. But I think there's also something to be said about, look, the system that we have in place is so complex and Byzantine that in many ways, there is always a clause or something from the sergeant of arms or whoever might jump in there or the parliamentarian to prevent us from doing anything. But it's also complex enough that if you really do,

dig down into emergency powers and you could do anything. Right. The difference is generally it has been at some level of consensus and not at the whim of an individual and a mercurial one at that with absolute silence and no pushback, even from those in his party who would disagree. This is an absolute utter takeover of the. apparatus of a political party and you asked why they would go along with it. And the reason is because they believe that the left is the enemy, not that they are a competing sort of worldview or any of those

other things, that they are an enemy. They are their enemy. And the dopamine hit that they get, this is an algorithmically driven kind of, look, populace are popular for a reason. they sell a story of you being forgotten and of a country in decline and of a people that have been abused and victimized and this man what does he say i am your vengeance i will fight for you and they don't give a shit how he does it or how punitive he is and if that means threatening to arrest the fed chair so be it that guy's corrupt anyway and he's our enemy And so this plays to the passions and prejudices of your base. And that's how it's all done.

Look, they're selling a story that the reason you can't, the reason why eggs are expensive is because some Somalis in Minnesota fucked with a Medicaid program. Yeah. Not that we spend a trillion dollars on like military equipment soon to be $1.5 trillion. dollars or not that we subsidize corporations and they suck a lot of the prosperity out of this country and they don't distribute it in any way within the country in any way that resembles fairness none of that matters to them for eat and so until they think there's some peri what's the i guess i would put that question back on you what do you think they think the peril is

some larger goal of constitutional bureaucracy like what why wouldn't they love him he's he's basically saying if you're for me you can go to the capital and beat the shit out of a policeman with the flagpole of a confederate flag

and I will praise you and pardon you but if you try and block a street and you clearly don't have any idea what you're doing, we can shoot you in the head. So why wouldn't they love that? You know, what your point makes me think about is the degree to which maybe during the Cold War, American politics was constrained,

was disciplined by the reality of the ideological contest between the Soviet Union, the need for America to be this beacon of freedom and democracy There was a sense in which, you know, Hubert Humphrey once said this, that he thought the reason for the civil rights movement was there was a foreign policy reason. We had to show the, you know, the communist world that America was, in fact, the, you know, the shining city on the hill. And, you know, and since then, I think what's happened is, honestly, we have no competition. We've become so powerful. It's exactly the opposite of the MAGA narrative.

We have no check, no constraint. So I think at some level, like the power has gone to our heads, and the power has gone particularly to somebody like Trump's head. Look at the way he treats other countries, right? The only reason you can do that is because you're so powerful, you're unconstrained. You don't have to worry that they're going to go over to the communist side. Like there's something here that feels very much like it's about the arrogance of power, the ability to act in unconstrained ways.

And I kind of wonder whether, you know, the reason we, when we were powerful in the past, there was this check. There was this sense in which, you know, you had to put forward your best front. Boy, this now, okay, this is very interesting to me. Hey, folks, it's Quince time. Now, if you're like me, you generally wait until Fashion Week to purchase your clothes for the upcoming year because you want to be honest. Trent. You'll see me in Milan

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Quince.com slash T-WS. The idea is when the battle was democracy versus communism, we almost had to. it's sort of like, hey, man, your parents are coming over. You're going to have to put on a suit and tie. You can't, you're not, you can't look sloppy if you're trying to get this job. So we had to live up to some of the ideals, or at least the ones that, you know, we thought were in bold to, to demonstrate to the world, sort of our vision, our version of, you remember during that same time, we put in God we trust on the coins to separate

ourselves from the godless communists. Yeah, yeah. So we had to demonstrate that our system actually was. So rather than our actions being a sort of function of absolute power, maybe it's that the worldview right now is not communism versus capitalism, but woke versus unwoke. Sort of the idea is multiculturalism versus singular monoculture. And that now we have to demonstrate not the high,

values of the Constitution, but we have to demonstrate, I guess, a more violent form of sorting. And the reason why we're not mad at Russia is because we view them through that prism. They're white and Christian, and they're defending, you know, Western civilization, not in the sense that we think of the Enlightenment, but of, you know, a more orthodox white Christian version of that. Yeah, exactly, exactly. The cultural divide that has developed now is one in which, I think, for somebody like J.D. Vance, Russia are actually the good guys, right? They're, as you say, they're white, they're Christian. In fact, Putin often makes the point of Putin is culturally a neo-conservative. I mean, he's against all the licentiousness of Western liberalism. So, by the way,

is Xi Jinping. And it's why they don't like Europe. Europe's too like gay and atheists. and right, they don't want any part of that. Exactly. They worry that the kind of acids of Western liberalism will change their societies as well. And so in many ways, the Russians and the Chinese are not just balancing against the West geopolitically, but they're balancing against them culturally because they don't want these forces of modernization and liberalism

to infect their societies. But the twist now, compared to the Cold War, is they have allies within the West. who feel the same way. Right. They have, you know, this is what's so different about this moment, whereas we've faced adversaries in the past. We faced ideological adversaries, geopolitical ones. But what's strange is we now have within the West

very important strong forces that kind of agree with our enemies. Right. And that's what is such a kind of, that's what makes it so difficult to navigate, you know, foreign policy because you watch Trump on Russia and Ukraine. And it's pretty clear. Everyone tries to find some rationale.

He hates the Ukrainians. He likes the Russians. He hates Zelensky. He likes Putin. Zelensky is the guy who got him impeached in his first term. His solution to peace is, I'm going to squeeze Zelensky, try to get the Ukrainians to make all the concessions they can, hand it over to Putin and plain peace and say, hey, I got peace. Can I please get the Nobel Peace Prize?

His problem so far is Putin wants more. Right. This is a very strange moment for the American president to be acting not as the lawyer for the embattled European democracy yearning to breathe free, but for the dictatorship, that is the aggressor. That I think has never happened. But Farid, if you look at it through the prism that you're talking about. The cultural one, exactly. The culture one. But also in terms of the one that you were talking about when the battle was democracy versus communism. and we had to demonstrate democracy. Well, if that's not the battle anymore, then we don't have to demonstrate the democracy works. But this is where I think it gets darker,

that it means that the actions that are being taken are not the whims of a mercurial maniac, but are much more purposeful, that changing it to Department of War is much more purposeful. Not backing Ukraine is not necessarily about, well, they never got the dirt on Biden that I wanted. It really is about, no, no, no, no, no. We're not the great democratic leaders,

like, you know, the people that we lionized in the old days. We are now Putin, Netanyahu, us, Erdogan, and Xi Jinping. And that is what we are demonstrating, because now we can police the purest, I mean, I don't know if you've seen some of this Homeland Security iconography that they're using. One homeland, our, one of you, all of them. Like, it is so, at this point, it's not even implicit of fascist iconography. They're just, it's just a direct translation.

And so much of it, I don't know if you've seen this as like 50s nostalgia. You know, they have these photographs of kind of old cars and pristine beaches. And it's so fascinating because the whole thing is the politics of nostalgia. You know, there's this one moment where in Nikki Haley and trying her best to do a MAGA imitation when she was running, she tweets something like, wasn't life so much simpler when we were growing up? And I was thinking to myself, so when would that be? Right.

Like, so you put it roughly speaking, I think for Nikki Haley, it would be the mid-sumption. 70s. And they're like, okay, the United States. The oil embargo. Right. We lost our first war in history. The president was impeached and had to resign. A hundred American cities were engulfed in ruinous race riots. Oil prices quadrupled in one day. And then we had, the economy was so bad, we had to rename, we had to create a new name for its stagflation. We had whip inflation now buttons we had to wear parade around. Those were the habit. I think there's something fascinating about it.

It's almost like I think we have an evolutionary need to forget bad things that happen and we remember the past in a kind of misty-eyed way or something. I think nostalgia is, you know, one of the things that Nikki Hale, you know, or any of those people, and I've always said this is when people say like it was, you know, it's never been like it was when I was a kid and you're like, right, because you were a kid, you were a child. The reason why you loved the world then is all you cared about. is when that ice cream truck was coming by. That's right.

Your parents paid the rent. Right, that's all you gave a shit about. So, of course, that nostalgia. And it's so fascinating because it's, and now that, like, Elon Musk either tweeted this out or, like, reposted it or did some shit. But it was literally that exact thing you were talking about. It was 1950s Rhodesia. And it was a picture in black and white of, like, this pristine, you know, looks suburban looking.

and you know south africa and it was the chaos and darkness and all that and you're like you do know in rhodesia how they got that right like do you understand and i used to think like oh they're hypocritical they don't understand how now i realize no they're saying this is how we do it colonialism you take it by force and you extract those resources cheaply and that's how you create and you police who gets to be there. Right. And you can create these utopias. Yeah, that, when I saw that,

I know the tweet you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. And I saw that and I thought to myself, you know, Elon Musk is so smart, but it's a perfect example of how these tech geniuses somehow seem to either lack any sort of historical understanding or any common sense. Like, you look at those pictures,

and as you say, you know, my reaction was, you do understand that that world on the left that is that beautiful Rhodesia was true for like 3% of Rhodicians who were white, who were tyrannizing the 97% who were not. And that's why you could live like that. And the same is true in South Africa. And by the way, I grew up in India where, you know, if you had looked at the British enclaves in Bombay and Delhi and Calcutta and Madras, they looked gorgeous. But, you know, if you kind of went and looked at rural poverty in India, you know, and looked at where all the money was being extracted in a way, I mean, it's sort of weird to me that they wouldn't, that somebody as smart as Elon Musk would not think to himself, how did this come to be, you know?

But it's almost, it's not even how it comes to be because that would that would entail an empathy for those that have been exploited. And they don't roll that way. What I'm saying is, they believe that's the way we should do it. If we have the opportunity to exploit to our benefit, we should do it. I think what it's missing is the realpolitik of it, which is to sustain that level of exploitation requires a tremendous amount of resources. And the further away you do it from your center of power, the harder it is to hold the forces of entropy. and chaos from exploding. And that's the thing. I don't even want to appeal to their moral center.

I don't think it exists. I don't think they look at Rhodesia and think, oh, that probably was a little fucked up for the other people who live there. But what they're not taking into account is how unsustainable it is because, let's go back to the Constitution, people want to be free.

They don't want taxation without representation. They have rights. And they are going to fight for them. And if you're the one holding them back, you're the one they're going to fight. And, you know, understanding that and building a foreign policy that was based around this idea that take Latin America, you know, we went in, we exploited it, we toppled regimes. And then we came to realize the point you're making. So for the last 40 or 50 years, really, ever since the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, both parties decided, let's have a different approach to Latin America. Let's partner with them.

Let's try to, you know, we'll figure out a way to help them restructure their economies. We help them transition. Almost every Latin American country in the early 80s was a military junta. They all became democracies by the 90s with the exception of Cuba. that whole process of partnering, integration, cooperation, you know, law enforcement cooperation, drug cooperation, ended up making the United States much more influential in Latin America. And it produced, you know, Mexico now is half a middle class society.

There's no migration from Mexico into the U.S. anymore because, you know, there are jobs there. All these good things happened. but it points to the dilemma you're describing. This is complicated. It's messy. You have to treat countries that are really not your equal like your equal. You have to give them respect and defer to them sometimes. And yet it has worked miraculously well with throwing that all away for this much older version of power and coercion, which doesn't work.

weird thing, right? Everybody, you know, there was this caricature, which is that all, everybody in America thought that if China, you know, kept doing what we were saying, China was going to become like America. But what's really happening is America is becoming more like China. We are becoming admiring of China's methods of running the economy. Right. State run capitalism. Right. Controlling the population of buying, you know, mineral rights around the world. It's like we are becoming them. And it's such a strange bargain for a country like ours to make that has so benefited from a world order that we ourselves created.

And the subterfuge of coups, not only is it exhausting, not only is it sort of undercutting the values by which we think we stand for, it's not sustainable. And it's a much more volatile system. And by the way, a constitutional republic is not really the best system by which to graft an imperial leader onto. So let's say he builds his giant fucking ballroom with all the gold trimmings and he knocks down the world. Like the next guy can just undo it because that's kind of how, you know, and when you start going into these systems that they're setting up of resentment, I don't know that we're going to be able to get that back. I don't know how other countries would be able to trust us knowing that one person who just decides to push it as far as you can push it can just come in. What did Trump do pulled out of 60 treaties the other day? You know, it's something that's true in personal life as well, right?

Like real deep abiding trust takes decades to build. Right. It's a lot of hard work. Rupturing trust is very easy. Because exactly as you say, because after this, you know, every European country, every Canadian, the Australians, they always know, you know, the Americans could do this again. So I kind of have to hedge. I kind of have to have an insurance policy.

I kind of have to have, you know, a way out at some kind of diversification. And that's the tragedy. we had been so reliable, but the world never thought that our allies never thought they needed an insurance policy. They needed to hedge against our becoming crazy rogue imperialists. And now they do. Look, you know, the holidays are over. Let's face facts. Christmas gifts, you got crushed.

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we make within that. So what is now, who is the leader of the free world? Because if we're the ones that are going into countries and dictating who can be their leaders, which we're doing, they've said it explicitly. Venezuela can have a new leader, but it has to be, they have to meet this requirement. So that's not a free election. What then is, what is the world order? Is it literally us, China, Russia, you know, some smaller strong men that also get to assert their spheres of influence in their things, a completely rotted EU that has no power. Like where does Canada, Australia, the EU, where does the block that we led, what becomes of that? We are leaving them leaderless. We are leaving them disunited and leaderless.

precisely because their strength came from being part of a whole, right? They individually, none of them, many of them are pretty strong, the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh largest economies in the world. But what gave them the power was that we were all together, we were united. So we'll end up in a kind of multipolar world, which is like the 19th century world, very unstable, very volatile, prone to war miscalculation, except this time we have nuclear weapons. So not a happy scenario, also not a world in which freedom has as much capacity to expand.

And to my mind, what is strange about all of it is we took something where we were at the center, where we were the rule setter, where we read the agenda set, and we've turned it into something where we've got this little box of the Western Hemisphere, which is, by the way, the least important of the three main regions in terms of even our own trading, our main trading partners are in Europe and Asia. But I tend to think, John, that maybe it's just again, I'm an optimistic immigrant. This is not going to last. This is not going to last. You know, Americans don't like this, I don't think.

I think the idea that America stands for nothing, stands for, you know, no higher ideals. The idea that the United States is just a bull. that it's going to literally consciously emulate the ways of old-fashioned imperialists, that it's going to essentially become a version of Putin's Russia. I don't think this is popular. I don't think people like it. I think that we are going through a bad phase in American history. And I think, you know, there is going to be some, at some point, the fever breaks.

And I think the problem is we have done damage. for a very, very, very long time. I know, I know, I know. And this is why I said to you, to me, the biggest puzzle is that the fever hasn't broken. But I, but you know, sometimes these things takes longer. Because of it's because it's too flattering to I think that nostalgia that you talk about

to a group of people that feel. And by the way, many of them feel rightfully let down that the systems that we talked about that created the prosperity in the world did leave them behind. And our system was not fast enough catch up and we did have a problem with not getting control over immigration. None of these stories is completely invented out of whole cloth. The thing I worry about is the narrative that we're

describing is one that makes perfect sense to what we observe in the world. But as we saw, you know, let's take Minneapolis as an example. I look at that video and I see something very different than what a parent i mean when the president of united states an hour afterwards just come out and say that's a domestic terrorist who's uh that was a terrorist attack trying to murder an ice agent and i'm like pretty sure that you know you know someone said like she was a well trained operative in a domestic terror and you're like well someone's trained in that but it's not her it's the officers they're the ones that are they're the ones that it seemed like getting back to our point, there were a lot of different ways that they could have accomplished

de-escalating that situation beyond killing the person. But they chose that. And it was a choice. Somebody was criticized, I see people criticizing liberals saying, so it's okay that she tried to murder that agent. You're like, no, we're not saying it's okay that she tried to murder an agent. What we're saying is from what we saw, that's not what she was trying to do. but we have two different interpretations. So my view of what are we doing in the world, I wonder, do they view it as, see America's back? And that's how they digest it.

I hope that this, it feels alien to me. It's surprising that someone, an authoritarian move like Trump's, normally a populist is more popular than he is. Yeah, I mean, and that's the hope again, you know, that he's governing to his base, which he's doing very well, but he is losing, you know, the majority, not a huge majority, but it does say, I mean, his approval ratings are in the high 30s at this point. But what you have to hope then is that the next, you know, Democrat or honestly, frankly, a Republican, like a John McCain type Republican, would come up and say, look, you know,

we're proud of the things we've done. We're proud that we were the richest country in the history of the world. We were also the most generous country in the history of the world. And I want to save the lives of the poorest people in Africa if I can do it at 1% of the federal budget, right? Sometimes I worry the Democrats are too scared to make the argument that, you know, there's something honorable and noble about the kind of things we were doing. Oh, I think they're too scared to make almost any argument at this point.

And they don't have the wherewithal. And I think what I see in the Trump administration is, I think at times they even have some worthy goals. But when they have a choice, you know, Trump says, we could do it the easy way or we could do it the hard way. I think what they like is doing it the hard way because the hard way is a way of showing power. Exactly. There is a way for them to do immigration enforcement in this country that doesn't involve

beating the shit out of people in target parking lots. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I think, by the way, that is the place the Democrats should be. Because as you say, the Democrats totally mishandled immigration over the last 10 years. Biden, you know, it was a disaster. You don't want to be supporting massive illegal immigration. It's wrong. It's bad, right? And so the question is, how do you get at this? That's right. And is there a way to do it that is more consistent with our values? And yet is very effective and very hardline. And, you know, I mean, look as an illegal immigrant,

I in particular don't like the idea that you can cut, you know, you can cut the line as it were. But, you know, there's a way to do it that's consistent with our values. And there's also, I think, you know, there's a sense that, yeah, if people are murderers and rapists and all that stuff and they're still in the country, yeah, get them. Like overwhelmingly Americans support that. And if that is what they were trying to accomplish, they could do it. But in the manner that they're doing it, it's almost as though they want the confrontation and they want the provocation.

And so everything is done in the most, you know, egregious manner they can possibly think of because they want the fight. And that's what you said. And that's what makes me think, oh, you know what? This isn't even incompetence. This isn't mercurial whims of a dictator. This is the plan. Right.

What their endgame on that is, I don't know. And it's sort of the opposite of. what the whole point of liberal democracy is. This is kind of like highly mobilized societies charged to find intern enemies. And, you know, it feels very different. Like the whole point of liberal democracy is you live in your house. The government respects your privacy. Nobody interferes with your, you know, you go on, you have your wonderful private life.

You know, civil society builds. That's what it used to be. And that's what the whole idea of capitalism and liberal democracy. And American democracy, the craziest thing to me has been watching the don't tread on me crowd flip over to you obey and you comply. That's what the founders want. Like, right, right. An idealization of state power. That's right. You know, that the president should be the one doling out, you know, I'm going to give me invidia this contract. I'm not going to give it to Exxon because you wasn't nice to me. Right. And now the Swiss can have lower tariffs because they gave me a gold bar. I mean,

that is, you know, that's that state power of a kind that, you know, no precedent has ever wielded. It was only, you know, maybe 25 years ago that Francis Fukuyama wrote the end of, you know, what was it, the end of history. The end of history. Yeah. And that it was that democracy, liberal democracy in particular, had triumphed over history. And now- It looked like that at the time, you know, it's funny.

It's like, it's like, that's the thing of. about life is, you know, this is what gives me hope, John. Nothing stays the same. Yes. So that's what we have to hope. To the ramparts. Marie Zakaria. Farii, thank you. Boy, what a, what a lovely chance to catch up. I've really enjoyed it. I hope I get a chance to see you again. Fereid Zakaria, host of CNN's. Freed Zakaria, GPS. Good luck over there at CNN. I don't know who's buying it next, but I hope that they believe in you and that you stay on and keep going. From your lips to God's ears.

All right. Well, actually, we haven't talked in a while, but I'll see what I can do. Feread, thanks for joining us. Pleasure. Fareed! I haven't seen him in a dog's age. He was the most frequent guests on the Daily Show.

You can see why. Yeah. And now he's, I wonder, if they, you know, what happens when they, when they sell CNN? Do they sell it for parts? Does he get just left out on a curb and then anybody can drive by and just pick it up? Just with a sign, a piece of paper that says free on it? Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Works well. Or they just start shutting parts down. Like, remember CNN Plus? That was a moment. Oh, God. They did that for like a week. And then they were like, ah, fuck this. This seems like it might be hard and then go, I really like that.

I don't even know who's going to get it. But the president, Trump is like, I'll decide who gets to buy it. And you're like, sure, that's not, I think that's how business works. You, you, you basically two people come to the father and say, I would like it. It's like Solomon, I'll cut CNN in half. And then one of you can take. Yeah. And then the father says you basically says you have X amount of time to make it worth my while, you know. Right. You got to make it worth my while and you've got to change it so that every time I turn it on, it makes me feel good. And that's the only thing that works. By the way, I thought it was interesting that, you know, I came into it with sort of the idea that, oh, we're being led by this sort of mercurial and they're following the whims and I don't know.

But I did leave thinking, oh, this is a darker, deeper plan. There does seem to be, yeah, like a unifying theory weirdly, which is, I mean, I think it goes back to what you say, which is big, fuck small. You can see it from what's going on in Minneapolis to what's going on in Venezuela. it's the one thing that seems to unite at all, which is just like the stick swinging contest. But it's big, fuck, small, but it's in regards to, it's not just a theory of power.

It's a theory of returning to a more colonial economy, an extraction economy of those weaker economies, and your country being more homogenous. Like there is actually now metrics, rather than just, oh, we have more weapons so we can take what we want. Like, but why are we doing? I also think something that you touched on that I can't get my head around is like the ideological

malleability of Maga. Like two seconds ago, it was America First, a type of isolationism. And then Steve Bannon, who was the mouthpiece partially for it, is now saying, well, there is that Western exceptionalism for isolation. It's like, oh, okay. There's a lot of exceptions to go along there. But I think the larger point is it is a return to great homogenous heritage-based powers extracting the resources they need from the unwashed masses of lessers.

Like, I think it's that dirty and dark in a lot of respects. And what they don't understand is the fresh hell that they've unleashed, not just morally, but in terms of stability and their ability to manage it. Yeah, we're going to miss the post-war world order when it's gone. Yeah, they're going to, I kind of like that. You're going to miss this world order. You know what, maybe that's the way to go here. Why don't we just fucking guilt them into this?

We worked very hard on that world order. You're going to miss it when it's gone. It's a terrible, terrible thing. Now, we've been gone forever. While we were gone, was the audience still active in some way? Are there things that they are we done now? Absolutely. All right.

We've got loads of questions for you. All right. Let's do it. First up, John. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bill and Hillary Clinton have announced that they won't comply with the subpoena from the House Oversight Committee's investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Do you think that they should comply?

I absolutely do. But why should they comply if the Department of Justice is not complying with releasing the files? Like, does, is compliance a, uh, uh, uh, a kind of specialized individual indigenous opportunity, or is it, should it be universal? I mean, the Department of Justice has subpoenaed them to testify in the Jeffrey Epstein case while not complying with releasing the files.

So how does that comport in any? But do I personally think they should comply? Absa fucking lootly. Absolutely. And if they've got something to hide or an affair, like, yes, we should know about all this. This is bonkers how long this is going on. And we have only seen such a fraction.

I think I was reading it's like two million files stuff to come out. It's 1% is what I've seen, yeah, like that we've seen. And the casual nature in these emails are like, hey, can you get me an Indian and a redhead? Like, it's, they're just casually, it's literally like they're ordering from, you know, Uber Eats. I mean, it's just. And the fact that we don't. And the spelling errors. It's humor.

That would bother Jillian the most. It's just, it's so, these people, you think they're titans of the world and they can't. I mean, kids type on a Blackberry. The grammar police have also indicted. The grammar police are doing more here. No, I think, I think that's wise. But absolutely they should, they should comply. And the Department of Justice should comply.

And these victims of this heinous case should finally get some of the just. justice and peace that they deserve. God's sakes. Preach. Fucking thing. Next up. John, which one do you like doing more? The Daily Show or the Weekly Show?

Oh, that is an excellent, excellent question. I... We're all listening. Any time you can do something in your house. If they would let me do the Daily Show from my house it may have the edge it is it's the whole thing is just part you you guys know that generally when i'm not doing this show or the daily show that i am in a state of stasis where uh the charger is unplugged and i sit quietly not talking to anybody for five days so i love the interaction of all of it

it helps uh you know i spend all the rest of my time when i'm not doing that reading articles about how not to get Alzheimer's. And the only way to do it, apparently, is to continue collaborating and being around people and engaging in the world. And this is the manner by which I choose to do it. And you are the people that I love doing it with. So that's, that's, no.

Take that daily show. Yeah. That was the takeaway. I meant both. Yeah. No, no, no, cut that. I'm taking it. But I will say,

the commute to the weekly show is much more. It's pretty good. They got any more? Any more for us? Yeah. Saw you joined Instagram, John. Does that mean you're through with Twitter?

Sorry, X. I did join, but I'm not really sure what to do with it. No one else is. Unfortunately, I joined it and then, but then I was like, so now what do I do? And then I was like, so that, I have to take a picture if I want to put something on there. Like you can't just write shit. You got to take a picture.

So I haven't used it yet. But I did join it. And I am going to put something there. I'll probably like put our stuff on there and daily shows stuff on there and maybe figure out some other shit if I could figure it out. But yeah, Twitter's rough, man. Like it's like there's only so many times that I say something random on Twitter like where I can be told I'm a Jew where you're just like,

hey, this is getting a little like, I know, I'm aware, like, not hiding. It'd be okay if you don't have to jump on and tell me. And the thing I don't, and by the way, Instagram could be the same fucking thing. I have no idea. It just seems like a slightly less toxic environment than the one that appears to have developed. But you guys, you guys are on it. What do you think? Just toxic in a different way.

Well, I think people are going to tell me I'm a Jew on both platforms. And I'm that. I mean, the nice thing for me is my life is relatively drab. So there will be no posturing about the fabulous, you know, fabulosity of all this. So I feel no pressure in that regard. As you guys can see, we were laughing about it earlier. By the way I dress and look like, I gave up about 17 years ago. I'm sure there's some thirst traps on the camera roll waiting for their moment. Yeah, listen. Thirst traps. I don't even. I shower in my clothes now. It's bad.

Jillian, are you on, you're on Instagram too, yeah? Yeah, I'm on Instagram. I'm not on X, the Everything app. I love myself too much for that. People are, it's fucking wild, man. Like, it's, and you really don't, like, you just think to yourself, like, I really do hope, actually, this is a Russian bot. Because if there's a human being out there who really felt the need in their day, like,

seconds after I posted something to just jump on there and be like, I'll never forgive you for the rally to restore sanity. You're like, what's your life? What's your fucking life? The good news is it certainly is a Russian bot. They all are Russian bots. Well, I can't wait to see your Instagram aesthetic. Oh, it's a lot like my Pinterest boards.

Oh, okay. It's going to be mostly Ann Taylor. Is that still a company? Yes, yes. All right. Great tales. Is it all right? I thought that was a reference from a while back, but I wasn't quite sure.

Well, guys, it's so good to be back with you and to get my Alzheimer's medicine for the day. And we'll move there. But as always, great preparation, great work. So lovely to have you guys back. Lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mehmedevick, producer Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer Rob Vitolo, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce and our executive producers, Chris McShane and Katie Gray. Thank you guys so much for reasons.

joining us after a lovely break, and we shall see you guys next week. The weekly show with John Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Bus Boy Productions. Look, you know, the holidays are over. Let's face facts. Christmas gifts, you got crushed. Why? Why do you have to buy a favorite?

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