Seth Meyers: Trump wanted me to apologize for making fun of him (REPRISE)

POLITICO's Off Message

POLITICO

News, Daily News, Politics

4.5 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2018

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A reprise episode: It wasn’t all porn star hush money: Michael Cohen once tried to negotiate an appearance by Donald Trump on Seth Meyers’ show, for what the “Late Night” host pitched as a fun way of coming together after torching Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. Meyers had invited Trump after running into him at the “Saturday Night Live” 40th anniversary special in February 2015, a few months before the real estate developer’s presidential campaign launched. Trump, Meyers told me in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, started out receptive to appearing on “Late Night,” but the conversation ended once Meyers refused a demand Cohen relayed that was non-negotiable to Trump: He wanted Meyers to go on air and publicly apologize for making fun of Trump at the dinner four years earlier. Neither a White House spokesman nor Cohen responded when asked what happened. POLITICO's Off Message podcast is hosted by Isaac Dovere and is part of the Panoply network. Produced by Zack Stanton. Executive Producer is Dave Shaw. Theme music by Podington Bear. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everyone. We're off this week, but I wanted to pull one of my favorite old episodes out of the archives. Enjoy. Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac Dover. If you get a call here in late 2019, 2020, that President Trump wants to come on the show. He's running for reelection. He wants to come on. What do you do? It's a classic hypothetical and that it's never going to happen. I will say that we were talking, like, before he was, it was 2014.
0:24.5	Because I ran, I run into, I had run into him at the S&L 40th.
0:28.8	And we were talking to him then about coming on the show.
0:31.0	I didn't think he was really going to run.
0:32.5	I thought it would be fun to talk to him about 2011 correspondence dinner.
0:35.7	Was he receptive to the idea? He said he was receptive to coming in the beginning.
0:39.7	There were some caveats he had that we were not interested in doing.
0:43.3	Like what?
0:44.6	Apologizing.
0:45.4	You wanted you to apologize on the air?
0:46.9	Yeah.
0:47.5	Which we would never have done.
0:49.2	These were conversations that took place with a man named Michael Culler.
0:59.4	Today's guest, Seth Myers, host of late night on NBC, a Saturday Night Live alum,
1:04.0	and really the one who led the way among the comedy hosts in building so much of his show around mocking Donald Trump every night.
1:06.0	He's also just celebrated his seventh anniversary of hosting the White House Correspondents
1:09.6	dinner, probably, as these things go, the most famous of the dinners. It was the one where both he and then
1:14.9	Obama ripped into Trump and which some say contributed to Trump's decision to run for president
1:19.3	just to show them up. It was also, though none of the people at the dinner except Obama knew it
1:24.7	at the time, and we wouldn't find out until the next night, happening as seals were raiding the bin Laden compound in Pakistan.
1:31.6	Seven years later, and he has a comedy show that starts at 1235 a.m. and Trump is in the White House.
1:37.1	When we originally put this interview on the calendar, we didn't know what was going to go down with Michelle Wolf's own performance at the correspondence dinner this year.
	...

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