David Letterman Rips Donald Trump, Calling Him “A Damaged Human Being”

By Scott Russell  |  October 7, 2016 | 12:00pm
Photos by Mike Coppola/Getty, Ethan Miller/Getty
Politics News David Letterman

It’s safe to say Donald Trump does not have a supporter in late-night legend David Letterman.

In an interview with The New York Times, Letterman first reminisced—almost fondly—about what made “big blowhard billionaire” Trump the ideal talk-show guest, telling The NYT’s Dave Itzkoff:

Nobody took him seriously, and people loved him when he would come on the show. I would make fun of his hair, I would call him a slumlord, I would make fun of his ties. And he could just take a punch like nothing. He was the perfect guest.

But Trump’s cartoonish entertainment value took a serious hit when he got political, Letterman says:

So now, he decides he’s running for president. And right out of the box, he goes after immigrants and how they’re drug dealers and they’re rapists. And everybody swallows hard. And they think, oh, well, somebody will take him aside and say, “Don, don’t do that.” But it didn’t happen.

Trump’s cruel and juvenile mockery of NYT reporter Serge Kovaleski, who suffers from a congenital disorder called arthrogryposis, was the last straw, said Letterman, who then delivered his most scathing indictment of The Donald:

And then I thought, if this was somebody else—if this was a member of your family or a next-door neighbor, a guy at work—you would immediately distance yourself from that person. And that’s what I thought would happen. Because if you can do that in a national forum, that says to me that you are a damaged human being. If you can do that, and not apologize, you’re a person to be shunned.

Letterman concluded the interview by sharing how he would approach Trump if he could host him on TV today, explaining:

If I had a show, I would have gone right after him. I would have said something like, “Hey, nice to see you. Now, let me ask you: what gives you the right to make fun of a human who is less fortunate, physically, than you are?”

David Letterman has never been one to mince words, and surely the #NeverTrump crowd, now growing by the day, will be glad to see that hasn’t changed.

Read Letterman’s full NYT interview here, and find the latest in a string of recent voting PSAs—imbued with a palpable, anti-Trump urgency—right here.

Cue Trump’s tweets about Letterman being irrelevant in three, two, one …

 
Join the discussion...