“What is going on?”
That question pretty much summed up Jon Stewart’s feeling about the media outrage surrounding Donald Trump’s recent—and, yes, ill-advised—decision to post a video to his Truth Social account of a pickup truck with a photo of a hogtied Joe Biden emblazoned across the back.
Tasteless? Sure. Unpresidential? Most definitely. Par for the course for Trump? Absolutely. But what really took The Daily Show host aback was the extreme reaction—or some might say overreaction—to the vehicular accoutrement on the part of the media.
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Both CNN and MSNBC were among the networks that refused to show any photos of the decaled truck in question “because of its violent and disturbing nature,” MSNBC’s Ali Velshi told viewers. Network colleague Katie Phang subsequently described it as “violent and dehumanizing” on-air. All of which made Stewart just want to see it more.
“This has got to be devastating,” Stewart concluded. “News channels show images from Ukraine, from Gaza, from natural disasters. They get through them dispassionately. I can’t imagine how devastating this footage must be.” Then came the footage:
Needless to say, Stewart was neither shocked nor disturbed.
“That’s what was so disturbing and dehumanizing you wouldn’t show it on television?” he asked no one in particular. “An airbrushed decal of Biden on the back of a truck? Aren’t you the same networks that show reruns of 9/11 every year?” he wondered aloud.
Stewart made it clear that he didn’t think it was “great” that a presumptive presidential candidate was posting images of this nature to his social media pages, but he’s also not as offended as so many other people seem to be.
“It’s not like people really think Joe Biden was tied up in the back of the truck,” remarked a bemused Stewart—though Velshi didn’t seem to agree. He spent a minute really detailing the specific elements of the imagery, and explained that “if you’re driving behind it, it would appear as if Joe Biden were actually restrained on the vehicle’s flatbed.”
While it took a few beats for Stewart to form an appropriate response to that, he eventually came up with simply this: “If you think that’s really Joe Biden tied up on the back of the pickup truck, I don’t know that you have the mental acuity to be operating a motor vehicle.”
