If Donald Trump proved anything in his prime-time speech Thursday night, it wasn’t that China or Venezuela hacked American voting machines during the 2020 election. It was that Trump, in 2026, couldn’t even hack an episode of the series. Press your luck.
In a disdain you can bet the president would later air — in fact, he couldn’t resist denouncing it during his speech as part of a “conspiracy” — two of the four major broadcast networks refused to boycott their regularly scheduled Trump programming. NBC stuck to reruns of its normal series Americas While ABC aired a new episode of the game show hosted by Elizabeth Banks in which contestants hit a giant button and hope the cartoon Whammy doesn’t steal all their money.
Good news for the president? Fox carried most of the speech live, while CBS — you know, the network now controlled by David Ellison, the son of Trump ally Larry Ellison, with Barry Weiss serving as editor-in-chief of CBS News — pre-empted the rebroadcast of the program. Young Sheldon spin off Georgie and Mandy’s first marriage For a special report by Tony Dokoupil on the title.
There is no doubt that broadcasters have become accustomed to treating prime-time presidential speeches as a sacred invitation. And Ronald Reagan’s speech after the Challenger disaster, George H.W. Bush’s speech as the Gulf War began, even Jimmy Carter’s speech on the “Crisis of Confidence” — the networks took down the airwaves to show those Oval Office speeches on television from coast to coast.
In recent years, however, broadcasters have become a bit more scrupulous about letting presidents onto their airwaves — or at least less predictable about when they’ll agree to take preemptive action. In 2014, for example, all four networks refused to air Barack Obama’s immigration reform speech, deeming it too political to air programs like it. Gray’s Anatomy and The biggest loser. However, five years later, those same networks carried Trump’s political rhetoric related to the border wall, which came as a shock to fans of proactive politics. blackish and FBI.
Adding to the confusion of this particular speech, it appears as if the White House never made the usual request for the network to air. Trump simply announced that he was going to announce “really big news” and seemed to assume that the networks would obediently regroup.
Meanwhile, on news channels, the coverage couldn’t have been more predictable. On CNN, Kaitlan Collins gathered an office full of pundits to cover and analyze the speech as it was broadcast off-screen, while MSNBC aired the first 17 minutes and then cut off for angry debate.
Only Fox News stuck with Trump until the bitter end, broadcasting the entire speech live and in vivid color.
