Here’s a clip from Charlie Rose’s interview with Jon Stewart from CBS This Morning, where the former Daily Show host reflects on the election, how Republicans’ cynicism helped Donald Trump win the presidency, and why he thinks many Democrats were hypocrites by generalizing that all of Trump’s supporters were racist. “I don’t believe we are a fundamentally different country today than we were two weeks ago. The same country, with all its grace and flaws and volatility and insecurity and strength and resilience, exists today as existed two weeks ago,” Stewart says. “I feel badly for whom this election will feel more uncertainty and insecurity, but I also feel like this fight has never been easy.”
Stewart also points one thing that bothered him in the months leading up to the election: “Nobody asked Donald Trump what makes America great. What are the metrics? Because it seems like, from listening to him, the metrics are that it’s a competition, and I think what many would say what makes us great is America is an anomaly in the world. There are a lot of people – and I think his candidacy has animated that thought – that a multi-ethnic, multicultural democracy is impossible. And that is what America, by its founding and constitutionally, is,” he says. “This is the fight we wage against ourselves and each other, because America is not natural. Natural is tribal. We’re fighting against thousands of years of human behavior and history to create something that no one’s ever done. That’s what’s exceptional about America. This ain’t easy.”
