Jon Stewart slammed the media’s response to Donald Trump‘s hush money conviction during The Daily Show on Monday, criticizing conservative outlets’ denial of the trial’s legitimacy and denouncing both sides’ polarized coverage of the event.
Last Thursday, a New York jury found the former president guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records after weeks of testimony from a former tabloid publisher, a Hollywood fixer, Trump’s former lawyer and a porn star. He will be sentenced on July 11.
In response to Republican commentators’ claims that the trial was rigged, Stewart said: “Yes, we impaneled grand juries and submitted evidence and cross-examined witnesses… But how was Donald Trump or his family not allowed on the jury? Outrageous!”
Later, while discussing the media’s weaponization of the court system, Stewart said, “Maybe our justice system wasn’t a sham, but certainly applying our justice system to Donald Trump was.”
He continued, “To admit their own political gamesmanship, their own attempts at weaponizing justice, their own relentless pursuit of opponents, their own dehumanizing rhetoric towards the left would be to allow a molecule of reality into the airtight distortion field that has been created to protect Magadonians from the harsh glare of actuality. It is a place where a moment such as this next one can pass without so much as a gasp of, ‘What planet do you live on?’ For it, it’s clearly not ours.”
Stewart also addressed Democratic response to the trial, saying the aftermath “was an exercise in concealed and controlled glee” and that the party’s challenge will now be figuring out how to “exploit the moment politically without giving the impression that this was the plan all along.”
He also poked fun at Biden’s viral press conference moment from Friday, when the president turned and smiled blankly at the press pool as he was leaving the room. “Why does everything have to be so weird?” Stewart asked, calling the scene a “Cheshire cat press conference.”
Stewart concluded his monologue with a harsh takedown of the media at large, arguing that both sides of the spectrum too often allow politicians to litigate issues on television, rather than in courthouses.
“Our political leaders are not in court, they are here on TV, where the news media has decided that there’s really no such thing as reality.”
Stewart then played a montage of news anchors alleging that Democratic and Republican Americans are now living in two separate realities. Stewart told the audience he disagrees with this idea entirely.
“No, you’re thinking of the multiverse,” Stewart said. “We are all living in one reality, and it can be the news media’s job to litigate the parameters of said reality. What the courts do really well is look backward and reconstruct the realities of what happened. The news media could do the same, but what they do instead is look forward and wildly speculate on the future.”
