David Letterman condemns Trump as 'a damaged human being' and 'a person to be shunned'

(Image credit: Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

published 7 October 2016

David Letterman remembers Donald Trump as "the perfect guest." "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," the former Late Night host recalled to The New York Times in an interview published Friday.

But while Letterman is no longer on TV to humorously keep Trump and Hillary Clinton in check, he offered up some harsh insight into what he's seen since Trump announced his White House aspirations:

So now, [Trump] 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'll take him aside and say, "Don, don't do that." But it didn't happen. And then, I can remember him doing an impression, behind a podium, of a reporter for The New York Times who has a congenital disorder. 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. [The New York Times]

"If you see somebody who's not behaving like any other human you've known, that means something," Letterman went on. "They need an appointment with a psychiatrist. They need a diagnosis and they need a prescription." Read the entire interview at The New York Times.

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.