Jon Stewart has one more thing to say before Americans vote, and he is not pretending to be neutral about it.
The “Daily Show” host recorded his final pre-midterms plea for his podcast “The Weekly Show” and shared a clip of it on social media Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026, a week before the Nov. 3 elections, urging listeners to cast ballots against President Donald Trump’s Republican candidates. The full episode aired Wednesday, Oct. 28.
“It’s the election,” Stewart said on the podcast. “This is the last time that we will speak before the election, and I just want to urge everybody out there to please, please — for the love of God — get out there and vote and express your political opinion.”
He kept going, and the second half is where the polite framing fell away. “I’d like to frame it as, ‘However you’ll vote,’ but I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean it as, ‘Please send a message to this reckless ****show of an administration that enough is enough, that we have had it, that it is time for someone to step up and provide, I believe the framers referred to them as checks and balances, on this utterly imperious administration.'”
A Song First, Then the Spiel
Stewart warmed up the way only he would, singing a snippet of “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from “Les Misérables” before turning serious. Once the plea was out of his system, he told listeners the episode itself would steer away from the campaign and toward a different kind of apocalypse — the financial sort, built around artificial intelligence.
Winning Congress Is Only Half of It
Stewart’s message to his own side has been less flattering than his message about Trump. On an earlier “Weekly Show” episode, he warned that flipping Congress would be the easy part, and that Democrats would then have to act on the cost of living. “They’re going to have to deliver,” he said, speaking about minority leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, both New York Democrats. Opposition to Trump, he argued, cannot be their entire personality; they need a prescription for rebalancing the economy.
He has also pushed back on impeachment talk, saying he has no appetite for a five-act performative run of House hearings that lets everyone pantomime accountability. Investigations are fine, Stewart said, but they belong in the waiting room behind the problems killing people right now. His bet is that Trump would simply outlast them anyway — and what he wants instead is a full government effort at rebalancing labor against capital.
From Yogi Bear to Camp Lejeune
The day before the podcast clip went out, on Monday, Oct. 26, Stewart devoted his “Daily Show” monologue to the president’s closing argument. He opened with a Fox News reporter cutting away from a young Trump rallygoer who was explaining that inflation and the instability of the Iran war were his top concerns, then turned to what Trump himself had chosen to talk about: oil company profits, veterans, a Muslim candidate and a campaign ad in Ohio.
At his Oct. 25 rally in Port Huron, Mich., Trump praised rapper Nicki Minaj’s “beautiful” backside, an aside tucked into his explanation that earlier comments about Ohio Sen. Jon Husted’s rear end were meant in fun and had been taken out of context by the news media. Minaj, a Trump supporter, had flown to the rally with the president on Air Force One. Stewart put up a photo of Trump standing behind her as she spoke. “He’s like Yogi Bear floating towards a pie on a windowsill,” he said.
From there the monologue darkened. Stewart walked through Trump’s attacks on Abdul El-Sayed, the surging progressive Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, and the ad from Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign featuring the estranged mother of Democratic candidate Amy Acton calling her daughter a liar — a woman Acton has not spoken to in 50 years. Trump defended the ad and attacked NBC reporter Monica Alba for asking about it.
Stewart also played a clip of Trump threatening that if Republicans lose, Camp Lejeune veterans with cancer caused by contaminated drinking water would not receive the settlement money they were legally awarded. That, in Stewart’s telling, was the closing pitch voters will answer on Nov. 3.