David Letterman rips into "damaged" Donald Trump
David Letterman is making no secret of his disdain for Donald Trump.
In an interview with the New York Times’ Dave Itzkoff, the 69-year-old entertainer -- who’s had Trump as a guest several times over the years -- teed off on the Republican presidential nominee, slamming him for his inflammatory comments on the campaign trail.
“Right out of the box, he goes after immigrants and how they’re drug dealers and they’re rapists,” Letterman said in the interview, published Friday. “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.”
The comedian went on to recall Trump’s disparaging invectives aimed at Serge Kovaleski, a Times journalist with a disability that limited his arms’ range of motion
“I can remember him doing an impression, behind a podium, of a reporter for The New York Times who has a congenital disorder,” he said. Trump, at a South Carolina event in November, made fun of Kovaleski by waving his arms in imitation of the reporter and mockingly telling rally-goers “you ought to see this guy.”
“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.”
“If you can do that in a national forum,” Lettermen went on, “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, who prefaced some of his comments by saying that he doesn’t “know anything about politics,” counseled Trump to seek professional help.
“I don’t know anything about trade agreements. I don’t know anything about China devaluing the yuan. But if you see somebody who’s not behaving like any other human you’ve known, that means something,” he said. “They need an appointment with a psychiatrist. They need a diagnosis and they need a prescription.”