Just two days after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this year, CNN announced that twice-impeached-once-indicted former president Donald Trump will headline a town hall on the network as a candidate for the 2024 race. And, according to the dinner’s host Roy Wood Jr., the timing was “well played.”
In hosting the event, Wood made sure to torch every politician, news network, news anchor (current and former) and political faction in the building. The “Daily Show” correspondent admitted in a new episode of “Beyond the Scenes” this week that he had no shortage of material to work with, but still applauded CNN for holding onto the news.
“Last week, Don Lemon got fired, Tucker Carlson got fired, there was all the stuff with the Fox-Dominion [Voting] settlement,” Wood explained. “And then this week, smartly, CNN, well played, announced after the Correspondents’ Dinner that they are going to have Donald Trump on their network doing a town hall.”
Wood then made it abundantly clear that he definitely would’ve laid into CNN a bit harder had the town hall been public knowledge at the time of the dinner
“Yo man, if the Correspondents’ Dinner was a couple days away? Yo,” he said. “It would’ve been a whole different situation.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Wood revealed that he definitely had some jokes planned about Elon Musk, but those “got pushed real fast,” thanks to the back-to-back news cycles including the arraignment of Trump, the firing of Carlson, and more.
According to one of Wood’s writers for the dinner, Musk “just seemed irrelevant” at that point.
You can watch the full episode of “Beyond the Scenes” in the video above.
