If Donald Trump proved anything with his primetime address Thursday night, it wasn’t that China or Venezuela hacked into America’s voting machines during the 2020 election. It was that Trump, in 2026, couldn’t even hack into an episode of Press Your Luck.
In a snub that you can bet the president will be posting about later — in fact, he couldn’t resist denouncing it during his speech as part of a “plot” — two of the Big Four broadcast networks declined to interrupt their regularly scheduled programming for Trump. NBC stuck with a rerun of its nature series The Americas while ABC aired a new episode of the Elizabeth Banks-hosted game show in which contestants smack a giant button and hope a cartoon Whammy doesn’t steal all their money.
The good news for the President? Fox carried most of the speech live, while CBS — you know, the network now controlled by David Ellison, son of Trump ally Larry Ellison, with Bari Weiss serving as editor-in-chief of CBS News — preempted a rerun of the Young Sheldon spinoff Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage for a Tony Dokoupil-anchored special report on the address.
Of course, broadcasters used to treat primetime presidential addresses as if they were a sacred summons. Ronald Reagan’s speech after the Challenger disaster, George H.W. Bush’s as the Gulf War began, even Jimmy Carter’s “crisis of confidence” lament — the networks parted the airwaves to put those Oval Office orations on televisions from coast to coast.
In more recent years, though, broadcasters have become a bit more finicky about letting presidents onto their airwaves — or at least less predictable about when they’ll agree to preempt. Back in 2014, for instance, all four networks declined to air Barack Obama’s immigration reform address, deeming it too political to bump shows like Grey’s Anatomy and The Biggest Loser. Five years later, though, those very same networks all carried Trump’s just-as-political border-wall address, a bummer for fans of pre-empted Black-ish and FBI.
Adding to the muddle with this particular speech, it appears as if the White House never actually made the customary request for network airtime. Trump simply declared he’d be announcing “really big news” and apparently assumed the networks would obediently rearrange their lineups.
Meanwhile, over on cable news, the coverage couldn’t have been more predictable. On CNN, Kaitlan Collins assembled a desk full of pundits to cover and analyze the speech as it played off-screen, while MSNBC aired the first 17 minutes then cut away for outraged discussion.
Only Fox News stayed with Trump until the bitter end, carrying the full speech live and in livid color.
