The world of late-night talk has had a bizarre relationship with Donald Trump over the last few months, with shows like The Tonight Show and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert alternating between bringing the Republican frontrunner onto their sets for strained but polite conversation (and the attendant ratings his boisterous assholery is always sure to bring), and slamming the Republican frontrunner with jokes about his small hands, his terrible hair, and his rampant bigotry. Now, one host has declared that he’s stepping out of the Trump cycle, with Late Night’s Seth Meyers stating last night that The Donald was unequivocally banned from his show.
Meyer’s statement—which came in the form of a scathing six-minute desk piece on last night’s Late Night—was inspired by Trump banning The Washington Post from his campaign, after the paper “misinterpreted” the candidate’s implications that President Obama was secretly sympathetic to the attacker who left 49 people dead in an Orlando nightclub on Monday. Meyers then went on to burn whatever bridges still stood between his show and the nightmare hellscape of Trumpworld—the biggest, classiest tire fire in the universe—by calling out Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric as “bigoted lies” and declaring it hateful and dangerous.
Of course, as Meyers himself notes, Trump wasn’t exactly beating a path to his door in the first place. While Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Ted Cruz have all plopped down on the Late Night couch, Trump has never appeared on the NBC show. (Thus denying the world segments like “Will His Hair Move?” and “Carpool Scary-oke.”) But it does set a precedent. It’ll be interesting to see whether any of Meyers late-night brethren will be willing to follow it.
UPDATE: Trump has responded to Meyers’ ban, issuing the sort of measured, thoughtful zingers we’ve all come to expect from a man campaigning for control of a nuclear arsenal that could render the human race extinct. “He has begged me to do the show for the last two years. I have told him emphatically ‘no,’” Trump said in a statement, referring to the late-night host. “I only like doing shows with good ratings, which as everybody knows, I only make better (by a lot).”