A gaunt and scruffy Jon Stewart took over Colbert’s Late Show Desk Thursday night. The retired Daily Show host compared Fox News host criticism of President Obama to some of those by Donald Trump.
Those not thrilled with Trump leading the GOP ticket have complained he’s far too much like the current president for their liking aaaaannnnd Stewart’s mashup makes that argument hard to refute.
The whole sketch reminds me of a post written by Republican strategist, Rick Wilson, some months ago aptly titled, “You Hate It From Barack Obama. But You Love It From Donald Trump.“:
I’ve come to realize that the Obama Cult and the Trump Cult are two sides of the same personality-cult coin. The cognitive dissonance between what the Trump faction hated about Obama and what they love about Donald is so far beyond ironic it would take a team of trained linguists and semioticians decades to decode.But I’ll try.You hated Barack Obama’s cult-like followers, with their mindless stares of adoration, their impervious barrier between emotion and reason, and their instant fury when confronted with the facts about his record, his history, or his philosophy.But you love it from Trump.You hated Obama’s shallow, facile rhetoric, with its hollow promises and loose, lowest-common-denominator word-vomit disconnected from any real policy.But you love it from Trump.You hated how Obama was gleefully lying to credulous low information voters, filling them with empty promises of economic prosperity that would never come, based on plans that could never be achieved.But you love it from Trump.You hated how Obama lied about his positions on single-payer healthcare, gay marriage, gun control, and abortion to get elected, knowing that if he ever revealed the truth about what he believed that he’d be unelectable.But you love it from Trump.You hated how Obama rode the wave of constant attention from the mainstream media into office, and how they played along with his game, draining the life out of every other candidate by describing him as an inevitable juggernaut, an unstoppable political force, and a game-changer who was tapping into something deep and powerful in American political life.But you love it from Trump.
It’s one thing for such criticism to echo within the bubble, but quite another for the seemingly obvious comparisons to be picked up by liberal counterparts.
“Here’s where we are — either Lump and his friend [Sean Hannity and Donald Trump] are lying about being bothered by thin-skinned, authoritarian less than Christian readers of prompter being president, or they don’t care as long as their thin-skinned prompter authoritarian tyrant narcissist. You just want that person to give you your country back, because you feel that you are this country’s rightful owners. There’s only one problem with that — this country isn’t yours,” Stewart concluded.
It’s a bit reductionist, but the heart of Stewart’s (and Wilson’s) point is worth exploring — why are so many deplorable characteristics acceptable because of an ‘R’?
Follow Kemberlee on Twitter @kemberleekaye
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