Despair or Discipline? Jon Stewart, Kaitlan Collins, and the Challenge of Covering Trump
Stewart mourns a system that no longer turns reporting into consequences. Collins builds the record anyway.
Fresh off a weekend of demeaning and sexist insults from the President of the United States, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins sat down with Jon Stewart for a timely interview that turned out to be, yes, convivial and funny, but far more revealing than either of them might have intended.
Of course, the context is Donald Trump and how the press covers him, and distinct postures emerged on the set of The Daily Show. Stewart delivered an understandable sense of despair, widely shared, and frankly accurate. Collins clearly conveyed a commitment to discipline, which may sound quaint until you understand just what it does. Both are honest responses to this presidency, but only one of them is a way to cover it journalistically.
Collins is working from a time-honored yet almost out-of-fashion rule, which is the whole argument. First, reporters establish what happened. Then you find out whether anyone acts on it. Whether the country’s institutions will respond is not a question a reporter gets to resolve in advance. Discipline.
But despair resolves it in advance. It assumes the second stage has already failed and converts that assumption into a tacit permission to neglect the first, which is an arrangement that guarantees the failure it predicted. Stewart can afford the despair because he’s an entertainment commentator, but too many members of the press have let that despair seep in. Stewart is well aware of this, and called his show cathartic but impotent, allowed that satire is supposed to be, and then said he thought her work deserved better.
He opened on JD Vance’s recent claim that if Watergate broke today, it would end up as a twelve-hour story, which doesn’t seem an incorrect assessment of defenses built around political corruption since. Viewers then heard a list of recent examples: The Qatari jet. The envoy taking money from the region where he is negotiating. The Epstein files, three million pages withheld, nobody in a prison cell. So Stewart asked his guest the honest version: does the press feel impotent?
Even if it’s authentic, Stewart’s despair is part of a comedy commentary bit. But what despair cannot survive is the briefing room or Oval Office gaggle. Trump’s built his entire approach to the press on the reaction shot. He takes a meaningful question, answers it with an insult, and waits. The reporter who obliges him has just traded the question for a fight, and maybe a little self-promotion since that fight becomes the headline and the viral clip.
That is a trade Trump would make every day of the week, and the reporters who make it are usually the ones who have decided nothing they ask will matter anyway, or worse, delight in the headline.
Collins declines that trade every time, and she explained why: the moment she lets it be about her, it becomes a back-and-forth between the two of them. So she asks again, and the refusal to answer becomes the story.
Her example was Scott Bessent, asked about putting Trump’s face on a $250 bill for the country’s 250th birthday, which is plainly illegal. Three reporters asked. The Treasury Secretary deflected to Congress. The room started to move on, which is what rooms do, and Collins asked a fourth time. Bessent said he saw no problem with it.
Nobody thinks a briefing question will topple anybody. But what this question produced was a sentence that didn’t exist ten minutes earlier. The Secretary of the Treasury was asked about something plainly illegal. Three times, and no comment, and he gets to walk out of that room with no on-the-record position at all. His “no problem” comment exists only because somebody refused to conclude that a fourth question was pointless.
Collins then brought up Vice President Vance’s other bizarre claim, that the deep state took down Nixon, pointing out that it was Nixon who took down Nixon. Then she added the part that matters most to the press: Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting did not end that presidency. Senate Republicans did after deciding he’d crossed a line; the record made that decision available to them. The press built the conditions, but it was elected officials who provided the consequence.
Those very conditions now cost more to build than they did in 1974. Collins brought up recent DOJ subpoenas herself: federal agents at reporters’ homes, a mother’s phone records sought, two spouses named, withdrawn only after a judge intervened. Nobody subpoenaed Carl Bernstein’s mom. Three nights before she said this (on Comedy Central, mind you), a ballroom full of DC journalists honored the reporting that provoked all of it, and yet nobody at the podium said a word about the subpoenas.
Thankfully, Collins is not alone in her disciplined approach. Jonathan Karl at ABC, Maggie Haberman and Shawn McCreesh at the New York Times, Jacqui Heinrich at Fox News, and a few others work the same way and prove discipline is a practice rather than a personality or a political position.
They are also increasingly outliers in a briefing room stacked with pro-Trump sycophantic influencers and ambitious operators who value access and proximity to power over, well… discipline. Despair, or being angry and sad about all of this, is a reasonable response. It has also never fixed a single thing.
Trump has beaten every reporter who showed up angry. He has never figured out what to do about the ones who just keep asking.
Watch the full interview below: