The TCA press tour continues this weekend, with a number of late-night cable comedy writers assembling this morning to talk about the guy they spend the rest of their weeks talking about, too: Donald Trump. According to The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline, 45-fatigue was a major part of a conversation held today between The Daily Show’s Hallie Haglund, The President Show head writer Christine Nangle, The Jim Jefferies Show head writer Jason Reich, and Full Frontal With Samantha Bee writer Ashley Nicole Black. “During Obama,” Haglund said, “We’d have a week where we didn’t use a clip of the president. We’d be talking about what else was going on in the world. We recently had an act where we did not say Trump’s name once. I cannot remember the last time that happened. It’s as frustrating as it is boring.”
Not that anybody on the panel thought the glut of televised presidential RTs would be abating any time soon. “If there was suddenly more cancer, there’d be a lot more cancer organizations fighting it,” said Nangle. “We made him. We allowed this to happen.” She also made the case that Trump has been valuable for the media, not just because programs satirizing him have seen their ratings rise over the last six months, but because it’s forced comedians to pay attention to the millions of people who voted for him, in an effort to understand how his presidency came to be
The comedy writers also expressed frustration with their cousins in the mainstream media, who often seem too eager to indulge in Trump’s sideshow sensationalism, rather than actual coverage of government actions. Still, Full Frontal’s Black noted, the presidential distraction machine is frequently irresistible: “It’s tough to do a segment on the impact of a bit of legislation that happened in the distant past, for instance, when Trump’s new White House communications director just said, ‘Someone wants to suck their own dick.‘”