Hence the repeated cycle we saw again last week. Trump says something blatantly false and offensive—in this case, that President Obama is “the founder” of ISIS. He repeats it, doubles down on it, insists on it. Then when everybody calls him on that, he insists with equal fervor that it was all just a joke, and what’s wrong with you, anyway, can’t you recognize sarcasm? And all of this comes with an extra nudge and wink, because his core supporters will believe he still really meant what he said and is only disavowing it to jerk around the media.

To be fair, this method is not unique to Stewart. If you recognize it from elsewhere, that’s because it’s a common trope of the Internet troll. Consider, for example, Milo Yiannopoulos’s insistence that “alt-right” creeps who post anti-Semitic memes are just a bunch of crazy kids having a laugh—sort of Hitlerjugend meets Katzenjammer Kids. This implies Trump is the first Internet troll candidate, campaigning for the lulz of getting everyone sputtering with outrage at the latest outburst that he maybe does and maybe doesn’t actually mean.

But Trump is just a symptom, just the inheritor of the political world wrought by Stewart and his ilk. They replaced reasoned discussion with ridicule, leaving themselves helpless before a man who is impervious to ridicule because he is impervious to shame. You can’t make his candidacy look like a joke, because he already beat you to it.