The journalists at CBS This Morning on Thursday brought on liberal Daily Show host Trevor Noah to pontificate as a serious political analyst and not a comedian. With no hint of Noah’s hard-left politics, the hosts tossed him softballs such as this one from Alex Wagner: “My question to you is do you think this crazy moment we're in is passing crazy or permanent crazy?”
Co-host Anthony Mason wondered offered this Larry King-esque comment about the President: “As a comedian, he gives you enormous material.... How do you determine where the lines [are]?” Offering no insight, Wagner asked: “Is anything off limit?”
Noah was on the show to promote his new book on Donald Trump’s tweets. Perhaps because The Daily Show and Comedy Central are divisions of CBS and Viacom, Wagner hailed: “The book is elegant, yet hilarious.”
What topics could the hosts have pressed Noah on? How about when Noah said on election night: “I’m officially shitting my pants. I genuinely do not understand how America can be this disorganized or this hateful.”
A few days after the election, Noah appeared on CBS This Morning to lament all the “misogyny” Hillary Clinton endured. In 2017, he wondered: “What is an extreme liberal? What is that?”
A transcript is below. Click “expand” to read more:
CBS This Morning
8/2/18
8:44ANTHONY MASON: Daily Show host Trevor Noah teased Special Council Robert Mueller this week about investigating the President’s tweets. Noah and his team are up for three Emmy awards this year, including outstanding variety talk series. It’s the comedian’s first nomination in that category since taking over the reins from Jon Stewart in 2015.
ALEX WAGNER: Now the writers of The Daily Show are out with a new book inspired by President Trump's tweets. It's called the Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library. The book is based on the show’s successful pop-up library that The Huffington Post describes as the most impressive satire of the current administration to date.” That is something. Trevor Noah is here. A television event. Good morning, my friend
TREVOR NOAH: Good morning, Alex.
WAGNER: The book is elegant, yet hilarious. It’s one of the first attempts we’ve seen to look at this presidency almost through a historical lens.
NOAH: Right.
WAGNER: My question to you is do you think this crazy moment we're in is passing crazy or permanent crazy?
NOAH: I think if you look at President Trump and that's what helps with looks at tweets and content, you have to look at that man and how consistent he’s been. And one thing we’ve known about Donald Trump is that like a star, he burns bright and he burns for much longer than a human would expect him to burn. So, it always feels like the crazy is going to pass. But this has been what people have said for, what, the last three years.
WAGNER: Sustained.
NOAH: People said it wouldn't go through to the election. People said it wouldn’t go beyond the election. People said it wouldn’t go beyond his first year or his second year. And so, we've come to realize this the world we live in now, this is the world that we share with Donald J. Trump. As you see, every single day there's a new story to talk about, often spark by his tweets.MASON: We often get bombarded with the tweets. What do you see when you put them all in a book?
NOAH: You see, that’s what is great about the book. We said we can't look at each tweet individually. It doesn't tell you a story. If you wake up every morning and you look at tweets like Marco Rubio said, you go crazy. When you put the tweets in context, it gives you a pattern on how Trump creates the smallest, benign things he creates nicknames for his political enemies. It also tell you how much he hates diet Coke. More than Hillary Clinton, you’ll be surprised to find out.
WAGNER: More than Hillary Clinton or more than Hillary Clinton hates diet Coke?
NOAH: More than Hillary Clinton. And then there’s how he sees the witch hunt. How he sees the investigation against him. How he communicates with people who work for him. You see how the Jeff Sessions is not something that he tweets in isolation. You start to notice a trend. And so when you put them into categories, you notice that not only is he an interesting president but he's the most prolific Twitter user we've seen in our lifetimes.
O’DONNELL: The most interesting thing about the Twitter is that while it's been a, perhaps, effective use of communication for him to speak directly with his supporters, what happened yesterday in the Tweet where he urged Jeff Sessions to end the investigation as the New York Times put it today, that tweet has crossed a line that Mr. Trump has never explicitly crossed until now.
NOAH: Right.
O’DONNELL: That it may be in terms of obstruction of justice where he directly said on a platform to his tens of millions of followers essentially urging obstruction of justice.
NOAH: What's interesting though is we're going to engage in should versus would. People are going to say are you saying should as in this is what I think you should do or verses must do. You must stop the investigation. And then also I think it's interesting that Donald J. Trump has flipped the script on every everybody.
He showed us what you do in private that get them busted if you do them in public it’s somehow better, which is not how I’ve ever lived my life. I’ve never seen an instance where doing something bad in public somehow lets you off the hook.
MASON: As a comedian, he gives you enormous material.
NOAH: Yes, he does. An embarrassment of riches.
MASON: How do you determine where the lines are in —
WAGNER: Is anything off limit?
MASON: Yes.
NOAH: Well, I work with what the President says. You know? Unlike most, I go, this is the president of the United States. I don't go hashtag #notthepresident. He is. So I will give him the respect and attention that he deserves. And so, that's what the Twitter library book is about. Although many presidents have used speeches and written words to convey their ideas, Donald J. Trump uses his tweets and so we've decided to acknowledge that in the book and give you context for that.
WAGNER: There are a host of people who say we're too focused on the tweets. As this is happening, there's regulatory rollback. There are changes being that are being made that have real significant changes on health care, the environment. But nobody's paying attention to that because the tweets are so addictive.
NOAH: Right. And I say to those people don't have more than one child because clearly you can't focus on more than one child. Because clearly you cannot focus on more than one thing at the same time. That’s what I’m saying to you.
WAGNER: I have only one child.
NOAH: Because I think you can focus on what the President is saying and you can also focus on what the administration is doing I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. So the idea that we can look at one thing at a time is a ludicrous concept to me. If you give adequate time, I mean that’s what you do on your show everyday.
O’DONNELL: But I give you a high five there. I do think you have to cover them, but as journalists we have to remind ours, the original reporting, the investigative reporting, the storytelling we do is just as important if not more important than now.
