Jon Stewart finds bright side, Fox News calls Trump a 'phoenix': TV reacts to election
Jon Stewart is trying to find the brighter side of the 2024 general election.
"The Daily Show" host went live for election night on Tuesday, trying to find "all the little glass-half-fulls out there" as former President Donald Trump continued to pull out ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris.
He pointed to Harris' win in Washington D.C. ("through voting not insurrection") and Maryland Democrat Angela Alsobrooks, who became the first Black candidate elected to represent the state in the Senate, as small victories.
"We are obviously digging through the results to find some that you like," Stewart said hesitantly. "Because you were nice enough to come here. And I'm just going to come here and (expletive) all over you?"
Late Tuesday, Stewart reflected on what the next day would look like if (now when) Trump secured the presidency.
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"We're going to make it seem like this is the finality of our civilization," he said. "This is the thing: We are all going to have to wake up tomorrow morning and work like hell to move the world to the place that we prefer it to be."
He also looked toward the future.
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"I promise you, this is not the end," he continued. "And we have to regroup, and we have to continue to fight and continue to work day in and day out to create the better society for our children, for this world, for this country that we know is possible. It's possible."
Here are more TV reactions to the election and Trump's win.
'The View' co-hosts Sunny Hostin, Whoopi Goldberg react to Trump win: 'Disturbed'
"The View" co-hosts — including Republican Alyssa Farah Griffin, who announced she would vote for Harris — expressed sadness, disappointment and hope in the wake of the election results.
Griffin said Trump's win wasn't "the outcome I wanted," but said that the people who voted for him are still "good, decent people who are patriots and love this country."
She then called for people to "bring down the temperature, the name-calling, the demonizing," and to work to understand each other.
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"I always thought he could win," she said. "I didn't expect it to be this resounding. And I think there are some lessons from it. I think we forget about rural America, I think the working class feels left behind ... He spoke to them. We might not have liked his words, but they turned out for him."
Sunny Hostin shared her fears about the working class, the future of Social Security, health care for the elderly, "mass deportations" and "internment camps."
"I worry about my children's future, especially my daughter, who now has less rights than I had," Hostin said. "I remember my father telling me many, many years ago, that I was the first person in his family to enjoy full civil rights. And now I have less civil rights than I had when he told me that."
Hostin attributed Harris' loss to "a referendum of cultural resentment in this country."
Ana Navarro, who was at the Harris campaign's headquarters in Washington when results came in, said she had "no regrets" over her support of Harris.
"I worked hard as hell to elect the first Black Asian woman president. History slipped through our fingers again," she said. "I worked hard as hell for Donald Trump not to be president. But today, unlike Donald Trump and his followers, I acknowledge that he won. I hope for the best for our country."
She told LGBTQ Americans, immigrants, elderly citizens and women that, "We will not stop fighting."
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg, who some time ago vowed never to speak Trump's name, kept her promise alive.
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"(Harris) did this in two months. Everybody can always say she should have done this, she should have done this. She was everywhere, she talked to everybody and people didn't come out," she said. "I don't know why and it doesn't even matter. He's now going to be president. And I'm still not going to say his name."
MSNBC's Joy Reid faults white women voters for Harris' North Carolina loss
"The ReidOut" host and MSNBC correspondent Joy Reid was among the pundits sharing takeaways from results coming in Tuesday night.
As MSNBC commentators discussed Harris' loss in the battleground state of North Carolina, Reid posited the reason for the loss.
"I think we have to be blunt about why. Black voters came through for Kamala Harris, white women voters did not," she said. "It's a state where women lost their reproductive rights, where there was a very heavy push to get women to focus on not ... putting back into the White House the person who was responsible for taking those rights away."
She added: "That message, obviously, was not enough to get enough white women to vote for Vice President Harris, a fellow woman."
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Fox News: Trump rose like a 'phoenix from the ashes'
Fox News commentators on Tuesday night were already preparing for a Trump victory.
During the network's election coverage, anchor Bret Baier called the Republican nominee "the biggest political phoenix from the ashes" in political history.
Commentator Ben Domenech said it was the "most incredible political comeback that we've seen since 1968," likely comparing Trump's win to Richard Nixon's turbulent path to victory in the late 1960s.
Anchor Laura Ingraham took it a step further: "I think it's not just the greatest political comeback of all time ... it will be the greatest comeback in history."
CNN's Van Jones gets emotional over 'nightmare' election results: 'A lot of hurt'
Early Wednesday, political analyst Van Jones spoke candidly on CNN about the election results, saying, "People woke up this morning with a big dream. They are going to wake up tomorrow in a nightmare."
Jones said that after Harris' loss, Black women were "facing rejection" after looking forward to a Black woman making it to the White House. They "tried to dream a big dream over the last couple of months. Tonight, they're trading in a lot of hope for a lot of hurt," he said, choked up.
The lawyer and author was also distressed for transgender children and immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.
"If you're a parent of a trans kid, your child's face was used as a springboard to power for somebody," he said of Trump. "That doesn't feel good. There are going to be people tomorrow who are going to be handing clothes at the dry cleaners to people who don’t have papers. There are going to be people cleaning your teeth tomorrow, who don't have papers. And they are terrified tonight."
Jones brushed off the suggestion that "liberal elites" were "going to get their comeuppance" in a second Trump presidency term.
"It's not the elites who are going to pay the price," Jones continued. "It's the people who woke up this morning with a dream and are going to bed with a nightmare. Those people will pay the price for whatever Donald Trump decides to do."
CNN commentator Scott Jennings: Trump victory is 'revenge of the working-class'
CNN commentator and USA TODAY columnist Scott Jennings interpreted Trump's victory as "the revenge of just the regular old, working-class American," he said on the network Tuesday night.
The political strategist attributed this group as "the anonymous American who has been crushed, insulted, condescended to. They're not garbage. They're not Nazis. They're just regular people who get up and go to work every day and are trying to make a better life for their kids."
Jennings also pointed out that Trump won the popular vote for "the first time for a Republican since 2004."
Trump's win is "a mandate to do what you said you were going to do: Get the economy working again for regular working-class Americans, fix immigration, try to get crime under control, try to reduce the chaos in the world," he said.