Jon Stewart took aim at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner during Monday’s monologue, arguing the annual event should not have happened amid President Donald Trump’s attacks on the First Amendment.
The comedian spent most of his 22-minute monologue Monday evening torching Trump’s address at Friday’s WHCD, roasting the president as the “ultimate snowflake” who is unable to tell a joke due to being “rewarded with unearned participation trophy laughs.”
However, before concluding his opening remarks, Stewart took a moment to call out the White House Correspondents’ Association, slamming the organization for “memorializing the collegial and cozy relationship” between the press corps and the Oval Office.
“Beyond the fact that Trump was terrible, the dinner should not have happened at all. In fact, it shouldn’t ever happen,” Stewart sounded off. “Quite frankly, memorializing the collegial and cozy relationship between the press and those that they cover is, at best, a very bad look in normal times.”
He added: “I don’t need to see the cops and robbers getting along at a banquet honoring our penal code. You can celebrate the First Amendment without asking your opponent in that fight what he thinks. You already know what he thinks.”
“The Daily Show” editors then cut to the various different times Trump has lashed out at the press, lambasting reporting as “fake news” and “corrupt.”
“As much as I enjoy Donald Trump having to squirm through Wolf Blitzer describing in vivid detail why The Wall Street Journal won a reporting award,” Stewart said. “It was the end of that tour de force that demonstrated the perverse bargain the entire night encapsulated.”
Specifically, Stewart roasted the dinner for being “worse than pro forma,” calling it “an act of submission.”
In a clip from the WHCD, Blitzer is seen explaining to the crowd that the WSJ won for reporting on Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, which prompted a lawsuit from the president and subsequently revealed journalist Khadeeja Safdar’s home address. Because of this, Safdar was forced to relocate her family.
“I’m a little stinker,” Stewart mocked as the footage showed Trump shrugging in response to the commentary. “She wrote an objectively true story about my depraved relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. And I got her life threatened. Did I do that?”
“I mean, you’d think you’d all be mad at him. But they’re all in there, just schnicking it up,” Stewart went on. “So he just gets to shake hands with the leaders of a profession whose members he has subpoenaed, arrested, sued, cut their funding, threatened their licenses, barred their access and even had f–king deported.”
As Stewart concluded his commentary, he quipped that the “sad truth” was that if “Trump had known he could win an award for that Epstein story, well, he’d have told them about the Epstein files himself.”
Watch Stewart’s full monologue above.
“The Daily Show” airs weeknights at 11 p.m. ET on Comedy Central.
