When Jon Stewart surprised The Daily Show fans by popping by Tuesday night after the Trump indictment, he was mostly there to do a silly bit with guest host Roy Wood Jr. that subverted the expectations for him to have an impassioned take on the proceedings. Turns out he was saving it for his own show.
On Friday’s episode of The Problem With Jon Stewart on Apple TV+, the comedian leaned into his strengths and went after the 24-hour cable news networks for its “jaded” coverage that both hyped up Trump’s arraignment and declared the underlying indictment a disappointment. And he wasn’t talking about Fox News.
“Oh, were you disappointed, were you depressed?” Stewart asked. “Here’s why: Because you treated this like the final confrontation with Thanos and then it actually just played out like what it was, a boring-as-shit legal procedure at the very beginning of what will be a long, drawn-out, laborious legal process.”
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He continued to go after the networks for being “let down by the expectations you motherfuckers created,” playing clips of commentators like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and CNN contributor Andrew McCabe warning that the case is “unimpressive” and “not a slam dunk.”
“Only our media, those cloistered, short attention span, own-ass-spelunking…” Stewart said before stopping himself to add, generously, “defenders of democracy, find a president paying hush money to a Playboy model and an adult film star, and then cooking the books to help himself win an election, underwhelming and boring.”
Finally, after briefly castigating Trump for underpaying Stormy Daniels, Stewart shared one more clip of MSNBC anchors discussing why “the silence of Mitch McConnell—fall or no fall—speaks volumes,” Stewart ended his segment by declaring, “Epic fucking media fail!”
For more, listen to former Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee on The Last Laugh podcast.
