How Trump Made This Liberal Comedian Conservative

The New Abnormal

The Daily Beast

News & Politics

4.6 • 7.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 July 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michael Ian Black celebrates July 4th with Joanna Coles and explains his reluctant transformation into what he jokingly calls “a conservative”—thanks to Donald Trump. The comedian and Daily Beast columnist describes how defending the IRS, foreign aid, and the post office over dinner with a Trump voter made him feel like he’d become “the man.” But it's not age that’s made him more conservative—it’s Trump’s destruction of public service, empathy, and the common good. Black traces his unlikely journey from straight-edge punk rocker to champion of bureaucracy, arguing that helping people shouldn’t be a radical act. He calls Trump “the worst thing for comedy” and slams the administration’s cruelty as both unfunny and un-American.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The post office, the goddamn post office that they want to privatize.
0:04.8	That's in the Constitution.
0:07.1	They talk about the post office lost such and such billions of dollars last year,
0:11.7	to which I always feel like saying, who gives a shit?
0:17.6	I'm Joanna Cole's chief content officer of The Daily Beast.
0:20.8	This is the Daily Beast podcast, and it's the perfect thing to listen to this weekend as you prepare your patties, as you get your fireworks ready, as you put the beer in the cooler, because it's an interview with the comedian Michael Ian Black.
0:34.2	It's a really fun interview based on his column for us on how he has become, well, how Donald Trump has driven him to be a conservative.
0:42.9	But it's not quite what it sounds. So, no further ado. Let's get to it.
0:50.2	So Michael Ian Black, our columnist at The Daily Beast, has written a very funny piece which will never...
0:57.0	I prefer to be called a star columnist at the Daily Beast.
1:00.5	Thank you.
1:01.7	Michael Ian Black, are star columnist at the Daily Beast, has written a piece that has gotten people very excited.
1:07.8	It's very funny about how Donald Trump has made you a conservative.
1:12.9	Sir, please explain. Well, I found myself at dinner in Las Vegas with a friend of mine,
1:21.6	who I don't know very well. We were sort of recent friends, and we'd certainly never had a
1:26.7	political conversation before. So we're having dinner. It turns out he voted for Trump. And we'd certainly never had a political conversation before.
1:27.9	So we're having dinner.
1:28.5	And it turns out he voted for Trump.
1:30.2	And then we had ourselves a spirited conversation about that fact.
1:37.8	And I found myself defending the institutions, the storied institutions of this nation.
1:49.2	I found myself defending such things as the IRS.
1:54.5	Which is not what comedians are supposed to do.
	...

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