WHAT FACT CHECK?

Jon Stewart Slams Networks for Giving Trump Airtime to Lie

Trump is expected to make new claims about the 2020 election in a primetime address on Thursday.

Jon Stewart called out news organizations for handing over their airwaves to President Trump for his upcoming speech about supposed election fraud.

Trump announced in a Monday Truth Social post that he would be addressing the nation on Thursday at 9 p.m. According to MS NOW, Trump is expected to discuss “newly declassified intelligence reports that the White House asserts reveal plans by foreign nations to interfere in the 2020 election.”

On his Weekly Show podcast on Wednesday, Stewart blasted the news media for platforming Trump’s election denialism, when a fan asked whether he thinks “news networks should carry the president’s remarks live on Thursday night or wait until they can fact check?”

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“Oh, they’re not gonna fact-check anyway,” Stewart scoffed. “They’re not gonna—what difference does that make? I think there should be a C-SPAN camera on the president at all times. Every remark he makes should be carried live, including whatever ketchup-splattering tantrums he might be throwing behind the room, when his gold-plated, new phones came out late,” he joked.

“Whatever it is. Listen, man, I don’t think we should have to live with the s--t that he spews out there whenever he feels like doing it,” Stewart continued. “I think you want to be ubiquitous—be ubiquitous.”

Added Stewart’s producer, “He’s still deciding the terms, even though we have this like 24-hour news cycle. He can’t get enough attention—and yet we’re still just like hanging on whatever words he selects that we pay attention to at any given moment.”

Trump’s upcoming speech, a continuation of his efforts to delegitimize the 2020 election, is expected to focus on Democratic Georgia senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, who were both elected in 2021. Ossoff told MS NOW on The Briefing with Jen Psaki that Trump will “create some pretext for an abuse of federal power, trying to create cover for state and local allies to get up to no good in those jurisdictions, and try to lay the groundwork for some kind of potential challenge to the result.”

On Wednesday, Stewart made a brutal analogy between Trump and America.

“I feel like the country is in an abusive relationship with a narcissistic partner,” he said. “I’m not fluent enough on the issues of the psychology of a relationship to know, how do we heal—how do people heal from that?”

“First of all, how do we get rid of him? How do you break up with a narcissist, and how do you not let the specter of the narcissist cloud and begin to rule your life?” he asked. “That’s the problem here: the narcissist isn’t thinking about us. He’s only thinking about himself. So we are left with the churn and bad feeling.”

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Eboni Boykin-PattersonEntertainment Reporter

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