Late-night hosts talk Donald Trump’s defense arguments and media coverage of his first criminal trial in New York.
The Daily Show
Jon Stewart used his Monday evening perch as guest host of The Daily Show to go after the US media’s breathless coverage of Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial in New York.
“This trial will obviously be a test of the fairness of the American legal system,” he said in a segment called America’s Most Tremendously Wanted. “But it’s also a test of the media’s ability to cover Donald Trump in a responsible way – a task they have acknowledged they’ve performed poorly in the past.”
Stewart played a series of mea culpas by media figures for giving Trump too much airtime or too much excited attention in 2016. After those lessons, said Stewart, “I think for this trial, we will see the seeds of that introspection bear fruit …
“Or, we will learn that learning curves are for pussies,” he continued, introducing numerous clips of news anchors calling it “the trial of the century” and engaging in what Stewart called an “all-encompassing spectacle of the most banal of details”.
“He arrived at the intersection of American history, where he put a quarter in the parking meter of destiny, leaving the car, looking to avoid stepping in the urine puddle of jurisprudence,” Stewart mocked of aerial footage of Trump’s car arriving at the courthouse. “Seriously, are we going to follow this guy to court every fucking day?” he wondered. “Are you trying to make this OJ? It’s not a chase – he’s commuting.
“At this point, you’re probably saying to yourself, ‘How many television hours have they devoted to what Donald Trump, a man who has not been off any of our screens for more than 30 seconds in the last eight years, looks like?’ The answer is not nearly as many hours as describing his every movement,” he added.
“Look, at some point in this trial, something important and revelatory is going to happen, but none of us are going to notice because of the hours spent on his speculative facial tics,” Stewart admonished. “If the media tries to make us feel like the most mundane bullshit is earth-shattering, we won’t believe you when it’s really interesting. It’s your classic ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf … Blitzer’.
“We’ve got a long ways to go here,” he continued. “It’s the first day of the first of his 438 trials to come. Pace yourselves, and if you’re bored, you can always start planning how you’re going to fuck up covering his next trial and the sober mea culpa you’ll deliver during his next term as president.”
Jimmy Kimmel
“The defendant was very defensive this morning,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Monday evening, after opening arguments in Trump’s trial began in earnest. The former president was “in all caps mode, and then some”, before his day in court. He posted “witch hunt!” and “election interference!” among other things – “little bursts of lunacy like a crazy man yelling at no one on a street corner,” Kimmel said.
The prosecution argued that Trump “orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 election” and, in his use of campaign funds to secretly pay the adult film star Stormy Daniels to stay silent about their tryst, tried to cover it up by “lying in his business records over and over and over again”.
Team Trump, meanwhile, argued that he was innocent because there’s nothing wrong with trying to influence any election, “and there’s nothing wrong with playing hide the mushroom with the star of the movie Hot Shower 6”, Kimmel joked. The defense “basically seems to add up to: ‘Even if I did commit these crimes, they’re not really crimes’”, he added.
Trump’s lawyers made it clear that they will continue to deny that the former president had sex with Daniels. “If I was prosecuting this case, I could get him to admit that in one second,” said Kimmel. “All you have to do is say ‘Clearly, Mr Trump was not attractive, famous or wealthy enough to entice such a desirable adult film star.’ He’d jump up on his hands and knees and show you every position they did it in.
“This is the first time we’ve ever seen a former president up on criminal charges,” Kimmel noted. “But what resonates most, from a historical perspective at least,” is a report from podcaster Ben Meiselas that Trump was “farting in the courtroom”.
“Just when you think the insane-o-meter has topped out, Donald Trump adds farting to his list of atrocities,” Kimmel mused. “We’re in uncharted territory here.”
