It was one of late night’s most talked-about moments in recent memory—and one that Jimmy Fallon would come to regret. But as a former Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon writer is revealing for the first time, Fallon mussing Donald Trump’s hair in the run-up to the 2016 election was meant to be a companion piece to another gag involving Trump’s then-opponent.
As Jon Rineman explains on LateNighter’s podcast Inside Late Night with Mark Malkoff, the hair tousle seen ‘round the world was conceived as “part of a much bigger stunt, callback-wise, that they were going to do with Hillary Clinton.”
However, shortly after the Fallon-Trump sit-down, the plan collapsed when Clinton changed her mind about her own bit with Fallon. “Hillary said, I don’t want to play ball anymore. So we got caught,” Rineman said.
Rineman went on to explain exactly what the show had planned for Fallon and Clinton—and it certainly sounds like something that would have made just as many headlines.
“She had been coughing a lot and she’d had pneumonia… And there was a rumor that she might be gravely ill, which was not accurate,” Rineman explained. “To pitch that she was not sick… she was going to grab Jimmy by the tie and give him a big kiss on the lips and then kind of push him away… push his face away.”
Afterward, Fallon’s face would have been smeared with Clinton’s lipstick.
“To balance that out, because they didn’t want to show bias,” Rineman explains, “they did the hair tousle [with Trump].”
According to Rineman, by the time Fallon mussed Trump’s hair, the Clinton-kisses-Fallon bit had been in the works for weeks.
“We knew about the Hillary bit because we had been told ‘No Bill Clinton jokes’… for a week or two, or whatever,” Rineman tells Malkoff.
“Be careful with the jokes you make. No sex jokes,” Rineman recounts being told. “We want to make sure she’d feel comfortable doing this bit.”
According to the Tonight Show writer, the writers kept racy punchlines out of the monologue in the weeks ahead of the planned appearance. “I think it was like, ‘Keep it clean, because this is a big thing for us,’” he explained.
Clinton did wind up taping her appearance on The Tonight Show just a day after Trump’s visit, but the comedy remained entirely platonic. Instead, Fallon referenced her bout of pneumonia by wearing a surgical mask when she came out.
Beyond being a viral moment, Fallon’s decision to run his hands through Trump’s hair to prove it wasn’t a toupee wound up landing Tonight Show host in hot water, with critics arguing he’d humanized Trump and helped get him elected.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Fallon would later say that he’d “made a mistake,” adding “I did not do it to normalize him or to say I believe in his political beliefs or any of that stuff.” The fallout from the well-intentioned bit, Fallon added, left him “depressed” and “devastated.”
Donald Trump guested on Fallon’s Tonight Show three times between announcing his candidacy for president in 2015 and his election win in 2016. Each time, the show welcomed Clinton on the program days later.
Jon Rineman joined Late Night with Jimmy Fallon as a staff writer in 2009, going on to become head monologue writer for Fallon’s Tonight Show through 2018. Most recently, he authored the novel The Garden’s Always Greener: Another NBA Timeline. His full conversation with Malkoff on Inside Late Night can be heard here.
Jimmy Fallon kissed trumps ass so well and so often that his lips are still orange. He claims he didn’t ‘normalize’ him, but his fawning was nauseous then and still is! Over and over.
If he had a SPINE, trumps vile racism and blatant sexism would have kept him off the show.
I’ll never forgive him.