Jon Stewart said former President Donald Trump has done the country “a service” by revealing corruption in the worlds of politics and business.

While speaking on his new podcast, The Weekly Show, he asked his guests whether Mr. Trump’s recent conviction on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records was “exposing a reality” of corruption.

“Is he exposing a reality? I’m not saying he’s not pushing the limit of it. I’m not saying he’s not exploiting it, but isn’t he exposing at some level a reality of crony capitalism, a reality of transactional corruption that is the heartbeat of corporate and political America?” Mr. Stewart asked.

The guests were Jane Mayer, chief Washington correspondent for the New Yorker magazine, and Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

In response to Mr. Stewart’s question, Ms. Mayer argued that corruption isn’t “the whole story.”

“There are incredible numbers of people in Washington who are really dedicated to doing the right thing for the right reasons, both Republicans and Democrats,” she said.

Still, Mr. Stewart credited the former president with bringing these “vulnerabilities” to light.

“He’s identifying though, a dissatisfaction — and two things can be true. One is there are a lot of really good, dedicated policy people and good-hearted, with-great-integrity people working in Washington every day to make the country work better,” he said.

“And number two is the system is so removed from the needs of its people and so insulated and isolated within the Beltway and within that very peculiar system within the Beltway, that it can’t actually accomplish the goal even those good-hearted people of integrity want it to,” he said.

Mr. Stewart argued for taking “the information that he’s delivering us” and “reverse engineer[ing]” it.

• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.