Jon Stewart on Trump’s Loyalist Cabinet Picks: ‘They’re Running on Dismantling’

Jon Stewart weighed in on Donald Trump‘s cabinet picks, arguing that the president-elect doesn’t see some of his more confounding selections a drawback, but rather as a feature given his previously-stated goals of overhauling and eliminating several of the country’s key agencies.

“I think we’re missing the mark on the idea that these picks will not be sufficient stewards of these agencies and administrations as a downside,” Stewart said on his Weekly Show podcast‘s Thursday episode, while also calling loyalty to Trump a “big factor” in the picks.

“They’re running on dismantling,” the Daily Show host continued. “When we say, ‘I don’t think that Linda McMahon will be an efficient steward of the Department of Education,’ it’s like, right, she’s not there to do that. She’s there to help dismantle it in the same way RFK is there to dismantle HSS.”

As Stewart referenced, Trump has said that he wants to try and shutter the Department of Education and put the onus onto the states. McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, has very minimal education experience, and along with her husband, Vince McMahon, was named in a sex abuse lawsuit against the company. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., meanwhile, has long peddled health policy misinformation and conspiracy theories. Other troubling picks include Fox News personality Pete Hegseth to run the Department of Defense — Hegseth was previously investigated over an alleged 2017 sexual assault — and Trump’s attorney general choice to replace Matt Gaetz, Pam Bondi, whose career is marked with several fundraising controversies.

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Stewart suggested that voters supported Trump’s policies because Democrats have failed to make changes and improvements to those departments for years, and voters have taken toward the president-elect’s more drastic rhetoric.

“[Trump] ran on ‘these institutions are not serving.’ It’s the thing we’ve been hammering Democrats on for decades,” Stewart said. “These bureaucracies have to be addressed. And they didn’t do it, they weren’t able to do it efficiently and they weren’t able to do it agilely.”