President Donald Trump’s anger at certain television networks for not airing his outlandish Thursday night address about election integrity was due to his desire for primetime attention.
On The Daily Beast Podcast, Joanna Coles and Daily Beast executive editor Hugh Dougherty broke down the president’s grievance-filled speech, in which he failed to back up many of his statements about election security, called for improving election security protections his administration has dismantled, and blew out of proportion intelligence reports that have already been publicized.
Trump, 80, also complained that ABC and NBC should lose their broadcast licenses for not airing his remarks, and accused them of being “part of a plot.”
“They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left. They can’t have a great country, and that’s true,” Trump asserted. “You can’t have a great country without free and fair elections. Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses.”
Trump’s rant was a reflection of his desire for attention, Dougherty said.
“He wanted this speech to be on primetime. There’s nothing he loves more than being on primetime. There’s nothing he loves more than ratings, and he was boycotted, effectively; he was switched off by ABC and by NBC,” he said.
“The angriest and honestly the most alive bit of this speech on Thursday night was when he demanded that they face revenge for not showing this speech. The rest of the speech was, if I’m honest, a bit low-T,” Dougherty added. “He was raspy. He was not quite slumped, but he was not standing energetically. And he went through a whole load of grievances... He’s very sore about what happened six years ago, and he became president again, but he can’t get over that he lost.”
After Trump’s 18-minute speech, the White House Rapid Response Team followed the president’s lead by attacking networks and members of the press for their coverage. Their X account even criticized ABC News senior justice correspondent Pierre Thomas for accurately noting that “there is no evidence that they [China] were able to change the outcome of votes.”
“There’s an obvious intellectual dissonance in this—not two words that one often associates with Donald Trump—but he complains that there was interference by China,“ Dougherty said. ”He doesn’t offer any proof. He didn’t even say that they changed votes or that they’d got Joe Biden to win. So this speech effectively acknowledged that Joe Biden had won because it didn’t say the opposite."
Coles added that Trump’s address is laying the groundwork to avoid blame for potential GOP losses in the midterms.
“This is him basically setting up for the midterm, saying, ‘Listen guys, if I lose, it’s nothing to do with me. People love me. They love the Republicans. It’s someone else’s fault.’”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
During the podcast, Coles also spoke with Stacey Kennedy, the CEO of PMI U.S., US Businesses of Philip Morris International, to discuss the future of American manufacturing, as part of our America250 series, produced in partnership with PMI U.S.
“I think the ingredients are in bringing communities together with business, because these are the people that make the magic happen,” Kennedy said. “If you want manufacturing, states have to create a great economic climate. They have to attract business. There has to be something in it for the community. And I fundamentally believe in the quality of American workforce, hands down.”
Kennedy explained that PMI U.S.’s new factory in Aurora, Colorado, took just 18 months “from ideation to operational.”
“This was because there was a fundamental need for us to produce more product, because consumers were demanding it,” she said. “You look for a great state that’s offering opportunity and a great workforce, and that’s what I think it takes. I think it takes all of those kinds of stakeholders working together to just get it going.”
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