Jon Stewart: Change in America requires will, stamina and attention

Jon Stewart has said he believes Donald Trump will make America great again – just not in the way that he thinks he will.

The US comedian, who hosted The Daily Show for 16 years, said the president has demonstrated how the current political situation in America is unsustainable.

Stewart has written and directed a new political satire, Irresistible, about an election in a small rural town that becomes the subject of national attention, and he told the PA news agency: “It’s kind of odd, I was saying to my friend ‘I’ve made a light-hearted political romp in a time of great tragedy’.

“He said it’s sort of like showing up at a plane crash with a chocolate bar, you’ve kind of walked in and you’re like ‘Hey, anyone want some chocolate?’ They are like ‘Yeah not really what we need right now?'”

He added: “I think having been an observer and commentator of it for 16 years, doing it kind of topically, I spent so much time looking at it through the tube.

“You get a very myopic view and what I began to feel like this is all just very cyclical and very redundant and the intensity of it just keeps growing and it was like an eddy and I felt like we couldn’t escape its gravitational pull of that eddy.

“And so I wanted to think about it like that was the weather, but what is the climate? And can we step back and look at this cyclone from up here and maybe be better diagnosticians about what we might do to pull us out of this maelstrom?”

Addressing if the system is capable of change as thousands of people march through US cities in support of Black Lives Matter, he said: “It’s absolutely capable of change and I think what you’re seeing is it can be changed through incremental reform or cataclysmic upheaval.

“I think sometimes when you prevent incremental reform as John Kennedy once said, if you make non-violent reform impossible, you make violent revolution inevitable.”

He added: “What you’re seeing from people, what they are saying is ‘This is not tenable, the path we are on is not tenable’, and we have to address that in a meaningful, non-Twitter time reaction.

“It’s a response that is going to take will and stamina and attention and I am hopeful because as Donald Trump said ‘I’m going to make America great again’, I just think he doesn’t realise it will be not in the way that he intended.

“I think what you are going to see is a grassroots dissatisfaction with the corruption and that is going to bring us, hopefully, to a better result.”

Irresistible is available to rent at home from Sky Store, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV & iTunes, Google Play and other digital retailers.