Stephen King Tells Colbert Why Trump Blocked Him on Twitter
“And that was it, man. That was it.”
Scott Kowalchyk/CBS
“The last time I was here, I had a president who had just given me a National Medal of the Arts,” Stephen King said when he sat down on The Late Show couch Wednesday night. “Now we’ve got a president who blocked me on Twitter.”
King, whose newest novel is called The Outsider, just happened to be visiting Stephen Colbert on the same day a federal judge ruled that it’s unconstitutional for the president of the United States to block users from seeing his tweets. “So my question is: do I really want to follow that guy?” the author asked. “I don’t think so.”
“What did you do to that good man that hurt his feelings so much that he felt the only way to defend himself from your harsh and hurtful words was to block you on Twitter?” Colbert asked.
“Well, I might have said he had his head somewhere where a certain yoga position would be necessary to get it there,” King replied. “And that was it, man. That was it.”
In response to Trump blocking him, King joked that he blocked the president from seeing the recent film version of his classic book It. “So no balloons for Donald Trump.”
Not only did King block the president back on Twitter, but he also decided to block Vice President Mike Pence, “Because whatever Donald said, Mike Pence would come out and say, ‘That's right. Exactly.’”
“And, you know, there was something about Mike Pence that’s creepy,” he continued. “And I think it has something to do with the hair. The hair doesn’t look like it has strands. It’s just there. He’s like the mean doctor on a soap opera, the one who sells drugs, you know, or has a prostitution ring from Bulgaria or something. He has that look.”
“It looks like it’s just one piece. It looks like his hair just snaps on,” Colbert agreed. “It’s like a Lego up there.”
More than that, King said he just found Pence’s tweets boring. “So I blocked his ass.”
Those comments came on the heels of an appearance at the annual PEN Literary Gala in New York this week. In his speech, King promoted the importance of literacy and intellectualism in the face of leaders whose “poverty of thought” is “best expressed in that intellectual dead zone known as Twitter, where clear thinking and kindness is too often replaced by schoolyard taunts. Not to mention bad spelling and bad grammar.”
Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.