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.
