Jon Stewart resorts to the f-word to lend emphasis to “infuriating” as he succinctly describes the two systems of justice in America — one for the rich and one for the poor. Stewart illustrates the dichotomy by explaining two different ways of purloining a bottle of cognac.
In a conversation stirred up by the arraignment of Donald Trump in New York City — an arrest that did not include handcuffs or mugshots — Stewart talked to a guest, Jay Jordan, who has spent time in jail and who has been arrested in much less demure proceedings than Trump’s.
Jordan tells Stewart the story of his first arrest, at age 15, for stealing a bottle of Hennessy. “There’s a phrase that everybody knows that’s been brutalized by the police,” Jordan says. “Everybody knows this phrase. It’s ‘quit resisting.’ When they say that, that is a green light to brutalize.”
In America, there are two tiers of justice… and Donald Trump is in the “good” tier. @misterjayjordan and @ProfMMurray describe how your average person is treated when they’re arrested vs. Trump’s treatment. Stream our season finale now on @AppleTVPlus. pic.twitter.com/EPF42bQVms
— The Problem With Jon Stewart (@TheProblem) April 7, 2023
Trump, who turned himself in, keeping an appointment as if at the barber, was not brutalized. Nor does anyone say he should have been.
But Stewart’s sense of injustice was triggered by the inequality in the proceedings, which for him symbolizes the two different systems. “When you see that, when you watch somebody and they say like ‘well, you know, if you had just taken money from your charitable foundation and bought the Hennessy and pretended that it was an expense for there, everything would be f*%$ing fine’ — like that must be infuriating,” Stewart said.
[Note: in 2019, Trump paid “more than $2 million in court-ordered damages to eight different charities for illegally misusing charitable funds at the Trump Foundation.”]
In response to Stewart, Jordan paraphrases social justice innovator Bryan Stephenson, saying “if you’re rich and guilty in this country you’re treated better than if you’re poor and innocent.”
It’s hardly only liberal-leaning people who recognize the tilt of the U.S. justice system toward the rich. Conservatives decry the same injustice.
When asked why he helped wrestler and media personality Hulk Hogan pursue his legal case against online publication Gawker, providing legal fees that eventually led to a Hogan-friendly result, conservative-leaning, Trump-supporting Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel laid bare the reality of how the legal system functions.
“If you’re a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system,” Theil said. “It costs too much.”
