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David Letterman is offering some words of wisdom for Seth Meyers, just days after Donald Trump called for his firing from Late Night.
After the president, 79, called for Meyers, 51, to be “immediately” canned from NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers in a Nov. 17 Truth Social post, Letterman — who himself hosted Late Night from 1982 to 1993 — shared his thoughts on the ordeal.
During a Tuesday, Nov. 25 appearance on the Barbara Gaines Show, the My Next Guest Needs No Introduction host offered a special “shoutout” to his friend.
“The president of the United States now wants to fire Seth Meyers. And I thought, ‘This is just delightful.’ How do you think that’s gonna go? Anyway, I’ve never been more proud of Seth Meyers,” Letterman said. “That’s our old show, as a matter of fact. We used to do that show.”
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After reiterating that Meyers “does a magical job” on the show, Letterman gave the new-school host some advice. “Just remember, Seth: things happen,” Letterman said, apparently in reference to Trump’s Nov. 18 comments about the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, where he said, “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”
Elsewhere in the clip, Letterman called Trump a “wonder of idiocy” and sarcastically said his rhetoric was “just fantastic.”
“It knows no bounds. It’s never-ending, he’s our current — he’s our dictator,” Letterman said. “He’s not going anywhere.”
The Late Show alum also called the president’s behavior “18-times the worst behavior one has witnessed anywhere.”
“Think of the worst thing that you’ve ever seen humans accomplish,” Letterman said. “This is so much worse. Couldn’t be more… Uh, it’s delightful.”
Trump’s spar with Meyers has been several weeks in the making, with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr reposting the president’s claims that Meyers is a “ratings disaster” earlier this month. Trump also fired off a post at 1:56 a.m. on Aug. 27 about Meyers, calling him “one of the least talented” hosts and claiming he has “the personality of an insecure child.”
In response to being on Trump’s “s— list,” Meyers joked in his Nov. 17 monologue that being attacked by the president on social media “doesn’t make me special in any way, shape or form.”
“I was simply on the same s— list as Christopher Wray, James Comey, Indiana Republicans, Thomas Massie, Rand Paul, Marjorie Taylor Greene and former President Joe Biden,” Meyers said.
He added, “I wanna clarify that I take no issue with the president voicing his displeasure with my show. That is his right and, on a lot of nights, he’s got a point.”
Letterman has been a longtime critic of the president. The comedian and host — who previously interviewed Trump on Late Night with David Letterman and Late Show with David Letterman — said in a 2019 interview with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Awards Chatter podcast that Trump “just liked being on TV” when he joined him on air in decades past, and that he “had no sense that he was the soulless bastard that he’s turned into.”
“He used to be kind of like the boob of New York that pretended to be wealthy, or we thought was wealthy, and now he’s just a psychotic,” Letterman said at the time. “Is that putting too fine a point on it?”
