
Before hosting the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Seth Meyers was on relatively good terms with Donald Trump, having worked with the then-reality TV host on his first SNL-hosting gig seven years earlier.
That night, however, set both men on different trajectories.
As legend has it, Trump was so angered by jokes that Meyers and then-President Barack Obama made at his expense as he sat in the audience at the Washington Hilton that he resolved to actually run for president himself.
And as Trump ran for president, became president, incited an insurrection, got indicted, and ran for president again, Meyers—who ascended to his own throne as host of NBC’s Late Night—has been one of his harshest (and funniest) critics throughout.
In a new interview with Vulture, Meyers reveals that after that fateful night in 2011, he actually extended an olive branch to the future president.
Asked to name his most combative post-joke encounter, Meyers recalled the time he saw Donald Trump at an event in New York two days after he’d hosted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
“I walked over and thanked him for being a good sport,” Meyers recalls. “And he did not take the opportunity to pretend he had been a good sport.”
“I’m going to say something, and I know this is breaking news,” Meyers added. “I think he may have a bad sense of humor. I think he might not get or enjoy jokes.”
Meyers has said as much in the past of his experience working with Trump on Saturday Night Live. “He was everything you think,” he told Howard Stern in 2019 . “He didn’t have a sense of humor, but if things worked [in front of the audience], he liked them.”
Meyers is set to make his HBO Comedy special debut this weekend when his new stand-up hour, Seth Meyers: Dad Man Walking, premieres Saturday October 26th at 10:00 p.m.