Jon Stewart was baffled by President Donald Trump’s response to Joe Biden being diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer.
Although Trump originally posted a polite Truth Social post wishing the former president well, he quickly got in on the right-wing accusations that Biden has been covering up the diagnosis for months.
At a press conference Monday, Trump mused, “I’m surprised that it wasn’t, you know, the public wasn’t notified a long time ago. Because to get to stage 9, that’s a long time.” For most cancers, the worst stage is stage 4.
Stewart responded to Trump’s comment by sitting in stunned silence for nearly 20 seconds straight.
“To be fair,” Stewart finally joked, “I do think, if Biden was at stage 9… we should have found out about that.”
“And he’s the one that’s fine, right? There’s no book coming out on him,” Stewart said about Trump, referencing Jake Tapper’s tell-all book Original Sin, covering Biden’s mental decline in the White House.
Later in his monologue, Stewart showed a montage of liberal pundits praising Biden’s acuity before his dropout in the 2024 election. He compared that to a montage of contemporary MAGA pundits praising Trump’s “pure honesty” and his “enormous compassion.”
Stewart, who had ripped into Tapper earlier in his monologue for taking so long to publish the “bombshell” information about Biden, joked that Tapper will one day publish an exposé on Trump’s mental decline—just not until he’s already out of office.
“Tapper’s 2031 book!” Stewart joked. “It’s gonna be lit!”
Stewart also mocked the media praise for Trump’s initial restrained, “astonishing” Truth Social response to Biden’s cancer diagnosis.
He zeroed in on CNN contributor Paul Begala, who said, “I will note, as an ardent Democrat, it’s really important that I speak up and thank President Trump for his gracious statement.”
“It is not important,” Stewart said, “that you speak up, at all. As a Democrat, as anything, it is not important. What [Trump] did was not noteworthy and important.”
“Has any president, has any person, ever had a lower bar to clear?” Stewart asked.
Doing an impression of Begala, Stewart joked, “I have to salute the president. I certainly disagree with him on many things, but I have to applaud that after hearing this devastating news about Joe Biden, that Donald did not take cancer’s side.”
