Letterman’s Trump interviews
ONE month before Jimmy Fallon ruffled Donald Trump’s hair last year, cementing the NBC host’s reputation as a late-night softballer, the Hillary Clinton campaign ran an ad featuring a clip from Late Show With David Letterman that presented a stark contrast.
In the clip, a deftly orchestrated confrontation from 2012, Letterman asked Trump, who had railed against exporting jobs to China, where his company makes its clothing. Letterman then plucked a Trump tie from behind his desk, examined the tag and announced it was made in China. This moment rendered Trump momentarily silent and confirmed the image of David Letterman as a savvy, trenchant interviewer, part of the reason there was such glee when he announced last week that he would be returning with a Netflix show rooted in longform conversation.
But the three-decade on-air relationship between Trump and Letterman is more complex than this ad suggested. What it did not show was that in the same episode, Letterman apologised to Trump for calling him a racist for promoting the lie that Barack Obama was not born in America. Trump had boycotted Late Show over the comment, and Letterman had held his ground at first, but after a year and a half, he capitulated and took back his criticism.
Before he became an outsider politician, Donald Trump was an establishment talk-show guest, appearing on Letterman’s shows more than 30 times. I rewatched all those episodes and what stands out is the chemistry between host and guest. Trump was an unusually game and entertaining guest, and Letterman clearly liked and got along with him.
At the same time, Trump test drove his current brand of populism to crowd-pleasing success in front of a blue-state audience, and Letterman was one of the first mainstream figures on television to regularly treat Trump as a serious political thinker.
ThefirsttimeTrumpappeared as a guest on Late Night With David Letterman was in 1987, the year he published The Art of the Deal. Trump bemoaned our “so-called allies” ripping us off by not paying enough for our military support. And there was his now familiar gloom and doom, expressed in the harsh hyperbole of a guy complaining to his taxi driver.
In the 1980s, Late Night did not have an articulated political perspective, and while its host expressed liberal leanings later in his career, back then his ideological slant was as unclear as, well, that of Trump. What they also shared was a gift for stinging insults, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Trump’s gibes found a receptive audience.
In Letterman’s final decade in late night, when he leaned more on long-form conversation than on scripted comedy, Trump acted as a pundit, hitting the same populist notes that became his campaign rhetoric. “I don’t see greatness unless we do something about China and some others,” he said in 2010, adding that America should be sending people in business, not diplomats, to negotiate deals.
With Trump, Letterman felt comfortable going long stretches without jokes, probing his thoughts on the issue of the day and treating him with more respect than he did a sparring partner like Bill O’Reilly. The host treated their disagreements seriously, pushing back, for instance, when Trump praised coal instead of green energy. “I’d rather see the windmills than the choking clouds of coal smoke,” Letterman responded.
Even though Trump’s political success owes a debt to popular culture, no talk show is responsible for his rise – and it’s important to recall that until recently, few thought him a plausible presidential candidate.
Letterman has said he never did, but what’s striking about the episode where he called Trump a racist is how seriously he took the comments about Barack Obama. “Nobody should be amused,” Letterman told another guest, Dr Phil, who made light of Trump’s embrace of the birther movement. Letterman wasn’t having it: “It’s all fun. It’s all a circus. It’s all a rodeo,” he said. “Until it smacks of racism”.
When Trump was considered by many to be a diversion, Letterman approached Trump’s outrageous comments with moral gravity. Letterman not only went further than Dr Phil, who said he didn’t think Trump was a racist, but argued earlier than most that what Trump was doing merited a serious response, not just jokes.
This year, Letterman said that he was wrong to say Trump wasn’t racist, and when he declared last week that Trump was on his wish list for an interview, it sounded as if he might be looking for a second chance.
“I have insight now that heretofore I did not have,” Letterman told the Hollywood Reporter about Trump, adding later, “What we need now is somebody like myself to sit down with him and calmly get him to sign some papers and then have him leave the White House.”