Trump Thinks Carson Would Go Easy on Him. Johnny’s Monologue Writer Disagrees.

Donald Trump wants Johnny Carson back.

He has left no doubt that the current crop of traditional late-night TV hosts all get so far under his skin he’d like to see them brought down and drummed out of the business—something he might try to make happen should the nation’s voters give him that chance next week.

Trump has frequently been on the record with his seething disdain for folks like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers, hosts who have made defeating him just short of a sacred crusade, and even Jimmy Fallon, who has been a bit less vociferous in his slagging of Trump, confining it mostly to jokes in his monologues and occasional impressions.

Kimmel and Colbert have even participated in campaign events to try to defeat Trump.

Given all that, it’s no wonder that Trump would long for the days when Carson ruled late night, and was widely considered a non-partisan, equal-opportunity parodist of political figures.

Here’s what Trump said last month: “These three guys are dying.” He was referencing Kimmel, Colbert and Fallon. He mentioned his own now infamous mussed-hair appearance with Fallon in 2015, saying, “I went on the show, The Tonight Show, which is dying. They’re all dying. Where’s Johnny Carson? Bring back Johnny. It makes you appreciate the greatness of Johnny Carson. These three guys are so bad.”

Carson, of course, passed away in 2005. So we can’t ask him how he might handle the “phenomenon” of Donald Trump. But at least according to one person who knew the late-night legend very well, Trump might not be laughing along with Johnny’s Trump-centric monologues were he still delivering them to millions of viewers on The Tonight Show.

“I think if Johnny were working today he would definitely dive in,” says Michael Barrie, who enjoyed a long career writing monologue jokes for Carson (and later for David Letterman). “I think he’d be offended and angered by Trump. Johnny was the epitome of decorum and good manners and Midwestern reticence and Trump is the antithesis of that.”

“But Johnny was sometimes motivated by anger. He’d see something in the paper that would make him angry and he’d call in the writers and say: let’s do something on this.”

Would he go as far as Kimmel, Colbert, Meyers and Fallon? “All these guys are doing jokes I can picture Johnny doing,” Barrie said.

You can actually find examples of Carson doing monologue jokes about Trump in his pre-Apprentice, New York real-estate magnate days. One, delivered when Trump was in the news for one of his many bankruptcies, began with Carson relating that when he was driving in to work that day he saw a guy by the side of the road collecting tin cans—and he realized it was Donald Trump.

Barrie says he doesn’t recall a lot of Trump jokes from those days, but adds that there was reason for that. “At that time Trump was just the biggest asshole in New York. Now it’s the world.”

Carson was known for keeping his personal political opinions mostly unstated—or at least understated. But Barrie says that reputation wasn’t entirely accurate.

“He got a lot of mileage out of Nixon and Watergate,” says Barrie. “Some people would just piss him off. He would channel that into his comedy. Comedians work a lot based on anger.”

Never overtly committed to any party, Carson was almost certainly progressive in his general opinions, Barrie says. Only twice did he remember Carson doing something publically that seemed to link him to a politician. Once was when he participated in a kind of celebrity telethon on behalf of Hubert Humphrey when he ran against Nixon in 1968. Johnny was on stage with other celebrities answering the phones.

The other time was when Carson agreed to perform at Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration in 1981. “Which I think he regretted later,” Barrie says. “I think he didn’t want to be labeled as a conservative.”

Barrie speculated that Carson saw that gig as friendly favor to Reagan, “a fellow Hollywood guy.” And perhaps also because Johnny’s long-time producer, Fred De Cordova, was still close to Reagan, having directed the movie Bedtime for Bonzo, in which the future President starred opposite a chimpanzee.

Exactly what Carson would joke about with Trump so persistently in the news is hard to say, Barrie says. “We’re all living in Donald Trump’s disordered mind. And it’s so pervasive. It’s all people think about sometimes. We’re on the verge of autocracy.” That surely would inspire Carson’s instincts for unstinting skewering of a political figure he didn’t like, Barrie says.

But would Johnny go as far as some of the contemporary late-night hosts? Both Colbert and Kimmel have played active roles in the Democrats effort to block Trump from being re-elected.

Barrie doesn’t rule it out. He notes that Carson was a World War II vet, someone who would have paid close attention to things like Trump’s former Chief of Staff John Kelly calling Trump a fascist who believed Hitler did some good things. Carson would have taken another fight against fascism very seriously, Barrie says.

“I think people think now it’s an existential fight,” he says. “So Carson might be active. Sort of like Dick Cheney. You’re not voting for a candidate. You’re voting for democracy. So he might jump in on that. I think it’s possible.”

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