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The Mary Sue
The Mary Sue
Rachel Leishman

Patton Oswalt is right about Donald Trump’s attack on late night

Donald Trump took a break for about a month before he started his nonsense again. Trying to attack late night television hosts once more, Trump is telling the powers that be to take hosts like Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel off the air for…talking about him?

Trump’s strategy is to attack their ratings the minute one of the hosts on late night starts to make fun of him. It doesn’t matter what they’re saying, he has an issue with it. He was been doing this over and over again but there is one show he refuses to acknowledge: South Park. And comedian Patton Oswalt hit the nail on the head as to why that is.

“Nothing shuts Trump up like money,” Oswalt said on the latest episode of The Daily Beast’s Last Laugh podcast. “He can argue that Stephen Colbert isn’t getting the ratings and isn’t making the money, even though the show is brilliant. But it’s not that Stephen Colbert is slipping in the ratings, it’s that the whole infrastructure of late-night television is slipping.”

Unfortunately, the views for late night are going down but it isn’t necessarily the fault of the hosts. It is just the reality of the world we live in with lower box office numbers, less people caring about late night, and more. But Oswalt went on to explain that Trump can be mad at shows like South Park but he doesn’t say anything about it because of money.

South Park not only does it make insane amount of some money, it gets insane ratings,” he said. “And Trump can only be so angry at that, because what Trump ultimately will respect, even if it doesn’t respect him, is something where the numbers are through the roof, and the money is through the roof. He can’t look at South Park and see how brilliant it is, and he can’t look at something like John Oliver and see how equally brilliant it is. All he can think of in terms of, look at this guy’s numbers, look at their numbers, and that’s the only way he sees the world.”

Oswalt went on to continue to compare South Park with the late night hosts, saying, “Something that is as massive and as undeniable as South Park, both in quality, which people like you and I can see, but then in numbers and money, which Trump can see, he just falls silent. If Colbert was making South Park money and getting South Park eyes on him, Trump wouldn’t know what to do.”

It is sadly how Trump operates. He respects one thing and one thing only: Money. And a show like South Park can say that he’s having a baby with Satan and he won’t complain because the show makes money. And that’s just who he is.

(featured image: Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images)

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