Figuring out Trump: the re-politicization of US late night talk shows in a polarized public sphere

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Since the early 2000s the U.S. late-night talk show (LNTS) genre has become politicised. Comedy Central’s The Daily Show (1999-present) forged a new path of partisan news review and political satire. This study asks how the tendentious comedy and critique developed on TDS amidst the divisive politics of the War on Terror became reconfigured after 2015 through the political rise of Donald Trump. The apparent absurdity of Trump and his views facilitated heavy hitting mockery and commentary calling out the supposed machinations of right-wing politics. However, Trump also became a problem of representation. Tied in with populism and the rise of fake news, Trumpism fed its own partisan mediasphere, which amplified Trump’s unprecedented lying and stoking of division. In this context, late-night hosts began to make sense of Trump via the frame of ‘threat’, not just to progressive values, but to U.S. democracy itself, leading to the adoption of non-comedic discursive strategies to respond to the dangers of Trumpism while their satire reached its limits. Although the political effects of these LNTS counter-discourses remain unclear, we conclude that popular media genres are key sites through which shifts in democratic politics and its mediation play out in the contemporary US.