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Wearing orange sunglasses, a beanie with green stripes, and a heavy beard—resembling a blissed-out Steve Zissou, or a snowboarding senior—David Letterman covers the new issue of New York magazine, out today. Although the 69-year-old television legend hasn’t had to mine the news for monologue material since May 2015 (when he took his final bow at The Late Show with David Letterman, concluding his 33-year tenure on late-night), Letterman revealed to writer David Marchese just how closely he’s been following the latest headlines. “If I still had a show, people would have to come and take me off the stage. ‘Dave, that’s enough about Trump. We’ve run out of tape,’” he said, imagining the exorbitant editing costs and inconvenienced celebrities guests who’d be blown off so he could rant. “It’s all I’d be talking about.”
Not long after the election, Letterman—who does not watch his former on-air competition, nor his successor, Stephen Colbert—toyed with the idea of calling then-president-elect Trump, who he said resembles Beach Boys guitarist Al Jardine (he went on to call Vice President Mike Pence a Bobby Knight lookalike who “scared the hell out of me,” White House chief strategist and “white supremacist” Steve Bannon a hard-drinking “Hunchback of Notre Dame,” Press Secretary Sean Spicer a “boob,” Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller a “creepy” person who “fell out of a truck,” and Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway “delightful” for how much comedic fodder she provides). Letterman never picked up the phone, but he has spent the past few months looking back on the man he and his 13-year-old son now refer to as “Trumpy,” who he interviewed dozens of times, beginning in 1987. In those early meetings, the host was respectful. “He was a mogul, for God’s sake,” Letterman said. But when Trump emerged as the leader of the Birther Movement, Letterman took pleasure in dressing down the future president, like in this appearance, where Trump derided China’s rise before Letterman informed him that his line of ties were in fact produced in China.
Around this time, on camera, Letterman postulated whether that Trump was racist, but nonetheless begged the former Apprentice host to return to the Ed Sullivan Theater, a decision he has said he regrets. Still, the Trump character, in Letterman’s opinion, was a necessary part of life in “the greatest city in the world.” “If you’re going to have New York City, you gotta have a Donald Trump,” Letterman said. “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. He seemed to have a good time, and the audience loved it, and that was Donald Trump.” Letterman also revealed that his friend in public relations always assured him that Trump wasn’t eager to be commander-in-chief. “He was just monkeying around for the publicity.”
Whereas Trump once was a harmless cartoon of affluence who made for good television, Letterman acknowledged to New York that he is now very much a threat to all of us, particularly because he has no accountability to his electorate. “He can lie about anything from the time he wakes up to what he has for lunch and he’s still the president,” Letterman said. “I don’t get that. I’m tired of people being bewildered about everything he says: ‘I can’t believe he said that.’ We gotta stop that and instead figure out ways to protect ourselves from him” with tools like comedy, which is especially effective against a leader who “has such thin skin” (Letterman’s a fan of Alec Baldwin‘s Trump impersonation on Saturday Night Live, but thought that Jimmy Fallon was too soft on Trump: “I think you have an obligation … to give him a bit of a scolding and he would have to sit there and take it.”). As Letterman sees it: “We know [Trump]’s crazy. We gotta take care of ourselves here now.”
