Jon Stewart has strong feelings about what he thinks will happen to MAGA after Donald Trump.
Speaking at a For Your Consideration event for The Daily Show on Tuesday, according to Variety, Stewart went with the Iron Man analogy to share his take on MAGA post-Donald Trump. Comparing MAGA to the Marvel Cinematic Universe may reveal a clue about where the movement is heading in the years after the 79-year-old president’s spearheading, Stewart argued.
“By attaching it to the MCU, that feels like it’s going to be non-transferable,” Stewart said, referring to Trump’s power.
“Once they lose Iron Man,” or Trump, he explained, “They can try and throw him back in there as Dr. Doom or some other f---ing thing.” Robert Downey Jr. is returning to the franchise as the Marvel villain Dr. Doom after Iron Man died in Avengers: Endgame, which Stewart believes is the only way MAGA continues if Trump is no longer in power.
“Do you think that audience is going to buy somebody else running that universe?” Stewart then asked Daily Show correspondent Jordan Klepper, who regularly confronts MAGA fans at pro-Trump events for the show.
Klepper was emphatic that no. “It is personality-based through and through,” he said, joking that within the MAGA MCU, he’s “not the good guy” but still “part of it.”
“I’m the heel, and they want to fight with me, they want to yell at me, and they want to take selfies with me,” he shared.
Klepper’s answer confirmed Stewart’s suspicion that MAGA likely wouldn’t survive post-Trump. “The entirety of the political punditry that talk about the inheritor of the movement is going to be Rubio, or it’s going to be Vance,” are wrong, he said.
“Actually no, it’s either going to be somebody with the Trump name, and it’s a family heirloom that’s passed down,” he said, “or whoever is the next leader of the Republican Party will be inheriting an entirely different machine.”
