Dave Chappelle vowed to give Donald Trump a “chance” after his win in 2016, and then implored him to “do better this time” when he was elected again in 2024. Now, the comedian is finally ready to stop expecting a different outcome.
Chappelle appeared on PBS NewsHour, where he was asked how he thinks Trump is doing since he was re-elected.
“You’re joking, right?” Chappelle laughed in response to the question before continuing. “He’s, man, come on, man. Nobody wants to feel this way. I don’t think anybody wanted a war. They definitely didn’t want to arguably lose one,” he said.
“I just know that Americans, I think everyone, wants to have some semblance of peace,” he continued. “And they get there different ways. Some people think there’s different things threatening their peace. But being a president seems like an opportunity to be a very unifying force. And I feel like perhaps, he squandered that opportunity, to put it lightly.”
Chappelle wished Trump “luck” during his Saturday Night Live monologue in 2016, while hosting the first episode post-election.
“America’s done it. We’ve actually elected an internet troll as our president,” he said then. Toward the end, he added, “I’m wishing Donald Trump luck, and I’m going to give him a chance. And we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one, too.”
The comments did not go over well with some anti-Trump critics.
The next time Trump won, Chappelle had a different tone during his 2024 reaction monologue on the show. “I mean this when I say this: Good luck,” he said, addressing Trump, and “Please, do better next time. Please, all of us, do better next time. Do not forget your humanity.”
The comedian told PBS that he doesn’t regret his remarks. “I believe in that same monologue,” he said. “I reminded him that everyone on earth is counting on him.”
However, he added, “I think I made the point that the presidency is no place for a petty person… anyone in any type of leadership position, or even like a nightclub comedian like me, we have to suffer slights and injuries, and we have to kind of just let some things go and we have to focus on what’s actually important and not cultivate a broth of confusion,” he explained.
He added that Trump is doing the opposite, “for political expediency or whatever reason. I don’t understand this methodology.”
Asked for his reflection on the 2016 monologue last year, Chappelle admitted that it hadn’t “aged well.”
“That’s what it felt like in that moment,” he said in an “Actors on Actors” interview for Variety. “Now, if it ages well or not, I don’t get mad if I look at a picture because it’s not today. That’s what it was at that time. You might look at an old set and cringe, but you could just cringe because of how you were at that time.”
Last week, Chappelle fired back at MAGA for touting the controversy over his jokes about trans people as a symbol of his alignment with Trump’s cause. “I did resent that the Republican Party ran on transgender jokes,” he told NPR. “I felt that they were doing a weaponized version of what I was doing.” He insisted, “It’s not what I was doing.”
