GREAT TARGET

Letterman: It’d be a laugh to go after ‘joke’ Prez

DAVID LETTERMAN may have retired from late night, but he still has plenty of zingers for his old foil and new President.

“I always regarded him as, if you’re going to have New York City, you gotta have a Donald Trump,” Letterman, 69, told New York magazine’s Vulture in a wideranging interview posted Sunday night. “He was a joke of a wealthy guy. We didn’t take him seriously. He’d sit down, and I would just start making fun of him. He never had any retort. He was big and doughy, and you could beat him up.”

Asked how he would attack the Tweeter-in-Chief, Letterman said, “I would just start with a list. ‘You did this. You did that. Don’t you feel stupid for having done that, Don? And who’s this goon Steve Bannon, and why do you want a white supremacist as one of your advisers? Come on, Don, we both know you’re lying. Now, stop it.’

“I think I would be in the position to give him a bit of a scolding, and he would have to sit there and take it,” the irreverent 33-year host of latenight TV added.

Letterman (photo), who had Trump on his show dozens of times before hanging up the mic in 2015, told Vulture, “The man has such thin skin that if you keep pressure on him . . . eventually Trump’s going to take a fastball off the sternum and have to leave the game.” That’s why he’s such a fan of Alec Baldwin and his “Saturday Night Live” impersonation — which has caused a number of Twitter rants from the President. “Alec Baldwin deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Sadly he’s not going to get it from this President,” Letterman said. Trump’s minions also got some ribbing as Letterman roasted Secretary of State Tillerson, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, press secretary Sean Spicer, senior adviser Stephen Miller and Vice President Pence.

As for his opinion on the current crop of late-night hosts, including his “Late Show” replacement Stephen Colbert, the funnyman said he doesn’t stay up to watch them.

He did see Jimmy Fallon’s viral clip of the host ruffling the thencandidate’s hair in a light-hearted interview.

“I don’t want to criticize Jimmy Fallon, but I can only tell you what I would have done in that situation: I would have gone to work on Trump,” Letterman said. “But the thing about it is, you don’t have to concoct a complicated satirical premise to joke about Donald Trump. It’s not, ‘Two guys walk intoabar. . .’ ”