Jon Stewart’s fear is not about one man’s ego alone, but about what happens when a democracy forgets how it’s supposed to work. He sees a presidency turning every independent institution into either an enemy or a servant—courts, media, civil servants all pushed to choose a side. When the referees are bullied, the game stops being fair; it becomes pure power. In that world, truth isn’t debated, it’s dictated.
His “burn the house down for the insurance money” metaphor is less a joke than a diagnosis of a leader who would rather wreck the stage than exit it. Stewart’s prediction is really a plea: that citizens stop treating this as background noise and start defending the fragile, human infrastructure of democracy. The ending, he insists, is still being written—and whether there’s anything left standing depends on how fiercely people choose institutions over idolatry.