Jon Stewart has taken the White House press corps to task for continuing to cater to Donald Trump’s whims.
The Daily Show anchor, 63, with a listener of his Weekly Show podcast who asked whether he thinks the White House press should “just ignore” the president instead of “running after him like Natalie Harp.”
“I do,” Stewart responded. “I actually think that he needs them more than they need him.”
Natalie Harp, Trump’s special assistant and obsessive superfan, has received a barrage of attention for her all-encompassing, often desperate, devotion to the president
Stewart said Trump’s presidency relies on a similar devotion from White House journalists, and that White House press conferences are just another place for him to perform. This approach means that journalists don’t gain much useful insight from exposure to the president, but Trump gets the attention that fuels his administration.
“The access to Trump is nothing because the system has been designed to his advantage,” Stewart said. “You can’t ask follow-ups. You can’t do anything. It’s just designed for his own personal performance, so it really serves no purpose in terms of public value. It’s just another platform for him to spew.”
The press continues feeding into this system not because it gives insight into the workings of the government, but because “it’s a content factory,” Stewart said. Rather than relaying official policy updates, the Trump administration is pandering to outlets it knows will further its agenda; rather than holding public officials accountable, the press corps is feeding Trump’s ego.
“It continues to generate content for all the other shows that exist and all the other aggregators,” Stewart said.
“As far as transparency, it’s not transparency,” he continued. “It’s, as my friend Mr. Bill O’Reilly would say, a petty fog machine. It’s petty foggery. And it’s all nonsense.”
If the press corps were to pull back in the press conferences, they would deny Trump “the thing that he craves the most, which is to be the center of the universe,” Stewart said.
