Comedian Jon Stewart had a grim outlook for what the endgame of President Donald Trump's second administration could be, in an interview on the Bill Simmons Podcast flagged by The Daily Beast on Friday evening.
The part that alarms Stewart most, in particular, is all the money that media outlets and tech companies are showering on the Trump family in the effort to curry favor.
"What you’re seeing now is, ‘All must pay tribute to the king.’ And the price of peace is different,” said Stewart. “ABC had to pay $15 million, Bezos had to pay $40 million for a documentary on Melania. Zuckerberg had to pay. They just put money into the pot."
He called it "protection money.”
“Ultimately at the end of this, does Trump burn our f------ country down for insurance money?" Stewart added. "Like, where are we headed?”
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Media companies and tech are far from alone in coughing up money. Trump also struck a series of agreements with law firms to contribute millions of dollars in pro bono work and change their hiring and representation policies, to avoid getting slapped with executive orders locking them out of government contracts and even access to federal buildings. Judges have recently ruled several of those orders unconstitutional.
Stewart went on to discuss the internal turmoil at CBS News over whether to settle Trump's suit with them, widely considered frivolous by legal experts, and the parade of executives and editors who have left the network in protest of the intent to do so.
“The reason they all left is part of the deal is they have to apologize,” said Stewart. “And in that moment, these people who have built careers on their excellence and their integrity had to look and go like, ‘Alright, well I hope I’ve done well enough that I can weather this, but there’s no f------ way that I’m going to apologize for doing my job the way it’s supposed to be done, just because this one guy is offended by it.’”