Jon Stewart was always going to skewer the historic arrest and arraignment of former president Donald Trump. However, he bided his time until the season finale of his own Apple TV+ show, The Problem With Jon Stewart, rather than gifting the commentary to his former Daily Show home.
The veteran late-night host crashed Tuesday’s episode of The Daily Show dressed as Star Wars character Obi-Wan Kenobi, but didn’t provide any takes on the indictment in his conversation with Roy Wood Jr., instead joking about his persona as “the wise sage who mentors the young host.”
But on Thursday, Stewart wasted no time tearing into the cable news media’s “jaded” coverage of Trump’s arrest, playing a montage of anchors being let down by the anticlimactic proceedings. “Oh, were you disappointed? Were you depressed?” Stewart asked. “Here’s why: because you treated this like the final confrontation with Thanos, and then it actually just played out like what it was, a boring-as-shit legal procedure at the very beginning of what will be a long, drawn-out, laborious legal process.” He added, “But please continue being let down by the expectations you motherfuckers created.”
This week the former president was charged with 34 felony counts related to the hush money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, and Stewart had some fun with the amount of said payment. “By the way, does anybody—and this is just an off-topic thing—did anyone think $130,000 to Stormy Daniels seems a little light? In this economy?” he asked. “That’s just a dollar figure not of this era. That’s some shit like Taft or Coolidge would have pulled. Coolidge would’ve been like, ‘How about $130,000, or perhaps…hmm…a Model T?’”
Stewart played several clips across MSNBC and CNN where various commentators called Trump’s indictment “underwhelming” and “unimpressive.” “Only our media, those cloistered, short-attention-span, own-ass-spelunking…” Stewart began before pausing to add, “no, defenders of democracy, find a president paying hush money to a Playboy model and an adult-film star, and then cooking the books to help himself win an election, underwhelming and boring.”
He went in for the final kill by playing a clip of MSNBC personalities discussing why “the silence of Mitch McConnell—fall or no fall—speaks volumes,” before declaring, “Epic fucking media fail!”
