Some might call it the preferred way to watch video of our next (and prior) president.
Fresh off the 2024 election set to place Donald Trump back in the White House for a second term, a YouTube user/Conan fan uploaded a compilation of his appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Well, not his actual appearances, but rather his faux visits to the show as part of its recurring “Clutch Cargo” segment.
Named for the short-lived cartoon that inspired the signature Late Night bit, O’Brien’s Clutch Cargo segments featured images of celebs—like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Clinton, and yes, often Trump—with their mouths crudely replaced with that of writer Robert Smigel, who delivered intentionally half-baked impressions of them.
The brainchild of Smigel and fellow Late Night writer Dino Stamatopoulos, the conceit was that the pictured guest was appearing “live via satellite” for an interview that always quickly went off the rails.
Last year, Smigel explained the genesis of the segment in an interview with the Television Academy. “I had this thing in my head that, at 12:30 at night, all the people who Conan interviews will have it in their heads that nobody’s watching,” he said, “so they can just say whatever they want.”
Clutch Cargo was an early trademark for O’Brien, who debuted the concept on his second-ever episode of Late Night—and even included it during test shows before the show actually started airing.
While the popular segment often skewered politicians, Trump was a far cry from the White House at the time these aired. The future president was merely a questionable billionaire at the time—though once he began hosting hit NBC reality competition show The Apprentice, he would become a familiar face on the network while remaining frequent fodder for Late Night.
The real Trump visited O’Brien’s 12:30 program seven times between 1997 and 2008. That’s not including these eight Clutch Cargo appearances, which have now been helpfully preserved for internet eternity.
