Jon Stewart has hit back at Ted Cruz after he attempted to mock The Daily Show on social media.
The exchange began after the Texas senator took a jab at Trevor Noah, the current host of The Daily Show, who took over from Stewart in 2015 after 16 years.
Cruz was reacting to a Daily Show segment in which Noah commented on the 2020 census. The US study impacts how many seats each state has in Congress, with Texas is poised to gain two as a result of the latest census.
In the segment, Noah expressed his bewilderment at how few people (89) it took for the state of New York to lose one seat in the House of Representatives.
“You’re telling me that if just 89 more New Yorkers had filled out their census, the state wouldn’t have lost a house seat?” he said. “89. I mean, that’s basically nothing.”
Cruz tweeted in response to the clip: “Trevor Noah whines that people are fleeing high-tax blue states & moving in droves to low-tax states like Texas, where the jobs are,” claiming that the Daily Show host “doesn’t understand why people like freedom”.
The Daily Show’s Twitter account replied: “Not sure I'd be using the words ‘fleeing’ and ‘Texas’ in the same sentence, Senator Cancun” – a reference to a trip taken by Cruz to Cancun in February this year while Texas faced a disastrous weather and power crisis.
Cruz replied: “I wear your scorn with pride. I remember when the Daily Show was funny.”
This is when Stewart stepped in, responding to Cruz’s tweet with: “Ummm... you remember last night?? Bravo.”
Stewart joined Twitter in January this year, originally to defend Redditors in their face-off with GameStop.
He now has 1.1 million followers on the platform.
