Jon Stewart evaluates President Trump's meritocracy of dunces

America is garbage. We know this, our President knows this, and even our late-night hosts know it. But that doesn't mean we can't fix the problems before us. Why, it was less than a hundred years ago that Americans rolled up their sleeves and got to work, ridding the world of the fascist menace overtaking Europe. Not so much today. We used to have Jobs, Cash, and Hope, and now we have a president demanding everyone take the pronouns out of their email signatures. Please, don't take our Bacon—not that we could afford eggs to go along with it.

After last week's awkward "technically, he's not a Nazi because the American government can't be used as a tool for fascism" monologue, Stewart returned to The Daily Show to take a peek at what Mr. Definitely Not A Fascist has been up to. In the last week, President Trump has gone about removing any references to transgender people from government websites, seemingly as part of an ongoing strategy to erase their existence from society. He's openly discussed annexing our allies, including Panama, Denmark, and Canada, while embarking on a self-destructive trade war with Canada, Mexico, and the E.U. Finally, he blamed the first major commercial plane crash in the U.S. in 16 years on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. What's more fascist than scapegoating someone's race for a tragedy?

Okay, so last week's monologue is aging like milk, but Stewart was more in the pocket tonight. He landed one of the best President Xi pronouns jokes ever written and said Trump is turning America into the "Jake Paul of nations" by picking fights with easy marks. A blow so forceful, it could knock out a 59-year-old. Stewart also rightly pinpointed the end goal here. The othering and erasing of transpeople and the DEI fear-baiting serve the same goal: "What they're trying to do is make the default setting on competence in America a white guy." The Trump presidency is all about recreating a social and racial order that places white guys back at the top—won't someone think of the poor white guys? More embarrassingly, this so-called meritocracy is being sold by incompetent, unqualified TV nobodies, members of the Trump family, and, apparently, Elon Musk's gaggle of interns currently staging a coup within the government. And what are the Democrats doing about it? They're securing a pair of reading glasses to the end of Chuck Schumer's nose, handing him a beer, and saying, "Go out there and tell the world how 'aroused' people are." Flex those arms, Americans: We can do it!