Donald Trump’s relationship with the media is complicated, to say the least. Sure, relations have soured, especially since Trump and his administration began branding reporters “the opposition party“—but as plenty of people have noted, and Trevor Noah pointed out on The Daily Show Tuesday night, Trump’s “movement” has in many ways benefited from the same industry he claims to detest.

The question of whether the media directly helped pave Trump’s path to victory has been debated over and over. But regardless of the answer, Noah pointed out that reporters’ fixation on the very thing Trump now accuses them of under-reporting—terrorism—could be to blame for turning the White House orange.

“Donald Trump should be thanking the media,” Noah said. “Because if they didn’t freak people out and hyper-report about terrorism, there’s a good chance he would still be fake-firing celebrities on NBC.”

As Noah explained, the Trump administration recently released a list of terrorist attacks that it claimed the media had inadequately covered. Examples included the 2015 San Bernardino attack, the 2015 attacks in Paris, and the 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Conspicuously missing, from that list were attacks executed by white perpetrators, like Dylann Roof and Robert Lewis Dear Jr., who carried out an attack on Planned Parenthood in 2015. The media, of course, rushed to defend itself from Trump administration’s accusation, as several outlets pointed out that they covered most of the attacks named on the list. This, Noah said, is also precisely what Trump wanted.

“He wanted to get the media wasting time trying to prove something that’s not provable,” Noah said. “You can’t prove if a terrorist attack is under-reported; it’s subjective. It’s like if Trump asked you to prove who the hottest Jonas brother is. You can’t.”

Perhaps even more important, the media’s rush to defend itself will now keep terrorism at the center of the national conversation—which could inadvertently strengthen Trump’s platform even more. What might Trump do with that platform? As Noah points out, it appears his endgame is already taking shape: as Reuters reported earlier this month, the Trump administration wants to re-vamp a government program designed to combat all violent ideologies to instead focus solely on Islamic extremism—ignoring groups like, say, white supremacists. Fixating on terrorism and the fear it creates could play right into Trump’s hand, and help normalize actions like this, should they be introduced as policy.

It’s no surprise that Trump knows how to use the media’s knee-jerk habits against it. He is, after all, an avid consumer of cable news. As Anderson Cooper put it to Seth Meyers on Tuesday’s Late Night, “He watches me on CNN probably more than my mom watches me on CNN.”