Jon Stewart takes over The Late Show to address Trump: 'We will prevail'

“Hello, Donald. It’s me, the guy you made sure everyone knew was Jewish on Twitter.”

Jon Stewart, former host of The Daily Show and now a familiar face on The Late Show, once again popped into Stephen Colbert‘s program on Thursday to send a message to President Donald Trump. At a time when “everything’s off its axis,” Russian leader Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un are considered “noble, intelligent role models,” and Canada is seen as “a bunch of giant assholes,” Stewart says “we will prevail” against Trump’s “dickishness.”

“If there’s one hallmark to your presidency that I think we’re finding the most difficult, it’s that, no matter what you do, it always comes with an extra layer of gleeful cruelty and dickishness,” he said. “It’s not just that you don’t want people taking a knee, it’s that they’re sons of b—es if they do. It’s not just denying women who accuse you of sexual assault, it’s saying they were too ugly anyway. You can’t just be against the media, they’re ‘enemies of the people.'”

When it comes to the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy on immigration, Stewart adds, “Boy, you f—ed that up.”

“You could have absolutely made a more stringent border policy that would have made your point about enforcement, but I guess it wouldn’t have felt right without a Dickensian level of villainy,” he said. “You casually separated people seeking asylum from their children, from babies.”

Stewart then asked to negotiate “an end to this gratuitous dickishness,” but quickly realized no one can “shame you into decency.” Here’s the “one place,” however, where he draws the line: “I won’t allow you and your sycophants to turn your cruelty into virtue.”

“As the great Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘I am the least racist person you’ve ever met. The blacks, they love me.’ Sorry, that was you,” Stewart joked before getting to an actual quote. “What Lincoln said in his Cooper Union speech was to point out the one thing Southern slaveholders really wanted from the free states. ‘This and only this: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.’ It was on this point that Lincoln said the Union could not bend, and what Donald Trump wants is for us to stop calling his cruelty and fear and divisiveness wrong, but to join him in calling it right — and this we cannot do. And I say, by not yielding, we will prevail.”

As a final dig, this one to Democratic representatives, Stewart referenced the backlash against Full Frontal‘s Samantha Bee for her Ivanka Trump “feckless c—” comment. “Unless, of course, the Democratic leadership continues to be a bunch of feckless…” he said as Colbert jumped in to close out the segment.

Watch a clip of Stewart’s appearance in the video above.