Given today’s political climate, there is no shortage of subject matter for writers and entertainers to tackle in late night and certainly no lack of individual shows competing to cover the Donald J. Trump administration. “Exhausting” was the word used by Jason Reich, head writer for Comedy Central’s The Jim Jeffries Show, hosted by the Australian comedian. “It’s hard to find it fun with Trump all the time,” he said.

Reich was part of a panel at the Summer TCA Press Tour featuring late-night comedy along with Ashley Nicole Black, writer and correspondent, TBS’ Full Frontal with Samantha Bee; Christine Nangle, head writer, Comedy Central’s The President Show; and Hallie Haglund, writer, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

“I think one of the challenges is to try to avoid the low-hanging fruit of, like, this person talks funny or has funny hair or something so easy,” said Nangle. “Speaking for The President Show, we try to look at what goes deeper than all that insanity, like, what made this man. He’s not just someone that dropped out of the sky and said, ‘I’m going to ruin everything for you.’ We made him. We allowed this to happen. So as much as you can go deeper without being heavy handed, that’s what we aim for.”

“It can also get really boring to deal with this same person, who’s provoking the same level of outrage with everything he does,” added Haglund. “I think about the Obama administration, where we’d have a week where we wouldn’t be using a clip from the president. We’d be talking about all the other things that were going on in the world. That gives you a lot more room to learn about things and make different kinds of jokes and just have different subject matter. A couple weeks ago I worked on something—I can’t even remember what it was now. But I remembered, after it aired, it was an act where we did not say Trump’s name once. And I was like, ‘I can’t remember the last time I worked on something like that. This feels extraordinary.’”

Another facet of Trump, and an almost daily headache for these writers, is his interest in, or perhaps better said – obsession with—Twitter.

“I feel like the tweets usually come in right as we’ve finished our morning meeting and just planned the entire show for the day,” said Haglund. “We shouldn’t have even had a meeting, because now we have to do all this stuff.”

Added Black: “When I flew here, I tweeted, ‘so excited to be on a plane for a couple hours and not find out what’s going to happen.” And then there were people tweeting. Like, ‘wait for it. wait for it.’ And when I got off the plane, it’s, like, ’Oh, you fired Reince Priebus while I was on the plane.’ You can reliably predict, every time you take a nap or get on a plane, that something’s going to happen.”

Of course, when these writers and producers dig deep, they do find other subjects to focus on outside of politics.

“Being the only female host (in late night), there are also things we know that nobody is going to touch that are there for us,” noted Black. “We did stories about child marriage or Catholic hospitals turning pregnant women away who needed help. Those are just stories that nobody is going to try to make funny that doesn’t have a uterus. So we are like, yeah, we know. We’ve got this beat covered.”

While covering the Trump administration might get repetitive for late-night writers, it also offers an almost never-ending stream of breaking news to cover. That means a larger audience and more advertisers. In today’s hyper-competitive TV environment, those aren’t factors to take for granted even if it also means contending with a little subject-matter fatigue.

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