60 Minutes - 6/19/2022: Londongrad, Democracy Lost, Trevor Noah

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

Why do so many Russian oligarchs live in the UK? Bill Whitaker has that story. Sharyn Alfonsi investigates how one country went from democracy to dictatorship in one generation. Lesley Stahl sits down with comedian Trevor Noah about what he thinks is the secret to his success. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer groceries that over-deliver. Why do so many Russian oligarchs live in the United Kingdom? We traveled to London, or London Grad as it's sometimes called, to find out. Was this all a strategy for the oligarchs to build influence here in the UK? I think the evidence is pretty clear that in some cases it was. How does a country go from democracy to dictatorship in one generation? It's easier than you may imagine. This is Juan Sebastian Chamorro,

a Georgetown-educated economist who was planning to challenge the dictator Daniel Ortega for president of Nicaragua. This video was recorded just hours before he was violently taken from his home by mass police officers. In it, he says, if you're seeing this, I've been captured. Trevor Noah has become one of the most successful and highest-paid comedians in the world. Pretty good for a guy who was born in South Africa and was a virtual unknown here when he took over The Daily Show from Jon Stewart in 2015. What's the secret to his success? Maybe it's his outsider mentality or his ability to handle most any topic, cancel culture, and the recent Dave Chappelle controversy. In your mind, did he cross the line?

I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. As Russian troops lay waste to Ukrainian cities, the West has tried to punish President Vladimir Putin by choking off the finances of his closest allies, mega-rich oligarchs who have lived abroad in luxury for decades. And while Europe and the U.S. have seized mansions and superyachts, frozen bank accounts and banned travel, the U.K. is lagging behind.

For years, Britain actively courted Russian billionaires, ignoring reports that some of their wealth was suspect. Today, there's so much Russian cash in Britain, the capital has been nicknamed London Grad. British intelligence has warned that oligarchs' money is propping up Putin's regime and helping to fund the war in Ukraine. As we first reported in April, the UK is under pressure to show its Western allies

it can stop the flood of corrupt money. Money has been flowing into the United Kingdom, absolutely no doubt about this, which often has had what I could only describe as a tainted source. But then Russia is a mafia state. Dominic Grieve is a former conservative member of parliament who served as attorney general and chaired Britain's intelligence committee.

His 2019 report on Russian interference in UK politics found Britain was awash in Russian oligarchs' money, much of it from untraceable sources. So one has to face up to the fact that if you're going to live in Russia or do business in Russia, you have to dance to the tune of the mafia boss, and the mafia boss is President Putin. You don't become an oligarch, you don't become a wealthy businessman in Russia without dancing to the tune of Putin.

A lot of Russian businessmen have very close links to the Kremlin. Others don't. But as long as you have a connection to Russia, then the risk is that if you don't conform to the requirements of the Russian state, you will come unstuck. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom has welcomed the oligarchs with few questions asked about their fortunes. Instead, a two million pound investment got special visas and a fast track to citizenship for hundreds of oligarchs.

Billions of pounds poured in and Russian tycoons went on a buying spree. Andrei Goryev, an oil billionaire, bought Wintonhurst. In London, only Buckingham Palace is larger. Roman Abramovich purchased the champion Chelsea Soccer Club. There was so much money, Dominique Reeves says, it was hard to tell legitimate investors from crooked ones. The 2019 report found it was so easy to wash dirty cash in Britain, the visa program was known as the laundromat. It sounds quite alarming what you found in this report. Everybody on it was in complete agreement that the United Kingdom was in danger of being complacent about the

threat that Russia posed in the round, one aspect of which was the fact that we had opened the door to allowing large quantities of Russian money to come into our country and to be invested here. Was this all a strategy for the oligarchs to sort of build influence here in the UK? I think the evidence is pretty clear that in some cases it was. It's a question of whether the influence is being used to try to soften up the responses of Western democracies towards the actions of the Russian state.

The oligarchs may live abroad in splendor, but most, not all, owe their fortunes to Vladimir Putin. Putin can make them do practically anything, says Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the richest billionaire in Russia. He's now just a millionaire in exile in London. Khodorkovsky told us many of the oligarchs thrive and survive at the indulgence of the Kremlin. There's no doubt about it,

he told us. Putin will give the order to recruit mercenaries, transfer money, or spread fake news on social media. He told us Putin uses oligarch money to help fund the war in Ukraine, and the oligarchs, Putin's foot soldiers, he calls them, simply comply. I think because they feel a noose around their neck tied by Putin, he told us, I can only explain it this way. In 2003, Khodorkovsky, an oil titan, dared to publicly criticize Putin. He was arrested and charged with fraud. The lion of industry was tried and convicted in a courtroom cage and spent 10 years in prison.

Is that why more people don't speak out against Putin? Yes, he told us, Putin wanted to send a message that no one was allowed to criticize him. If you don't do what the Kremlin wants, you can easily be imprisoned. Khodorkovsky told us the oligarchs's links to the Kremlin should have set off alarms. Instead, the infusion of money ignited a London real estate boom. A government report found one of the easiest ways to turn dirty money into a legitimate asset is to buy a house. Incredibly grand stairways.

Oliver Bulla worked as a journalist in Russia and now writes books on financial crimes. He showed us around to explain how the laundromat works. This is the neighborhood of choice for the Russian oligarchs. This is Belgravia. These neighborhoods around Eaton Square are some of the most expensive on earth. Once the exclusive preserve of dukes and barons, now... There is this nickname for Eaton Square are some of the most expensive on earth. Once the exclusive preserve of dukes and barons, now...

There is this nickname for Eaton Square, it's called Red Square, because there's so many Russians. I mean, it's a slightly ironic nickname, because obviously Red Square is, you know, tends to be associated with communism. The anti-corruption group Transparency International estimates Russian oligarchs with links to the Kremlin own at least $2 billion worth of property in London. So if an oligarch were to buy in here, he could clean his money and his reputation?

Yeah, if you're the kind of person who can own a house on Eton Square, you're slipping in, seamlessly slipping into a tradition of aristocracy, of nobility. It's powerful. It's powerful. It's powerful, right? You are someone who has stolen a company in Russia. You are only rich because you're friends with Vladimir Putin. But look at what you've got. Look where you are. This is London's core industry.

This is what we do. Transforming thugs into aristocrats 24 hours a day. Oligarch care in London is worth an estimated $350 million a year. Real estate agents, tax advisors, bankers have become rich serving them. High-powered lawyers deploy the British legal system to protect them. All the while, Bulla told us, most British politicians turned a blind eye. There was a general feeling that if the money was coming here and paying taxes, that was building schools and building roads and building hospitals. And we didn't care where it came from.

But it seems extraordinary now, looking back, that the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 did not occasion a national conversation, at least, about what we were doing. A former KGB spy, Alexander Litvinenko, was working with British police to expose the Russian mafia when Kremlin assassins put a radioactive toxin in his teacup. In 2018, Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter survived an attack with a Soviet-era nerve agent on British soil. Still, Bola told us, the laundromat churned on. Only now, with Russian missiles raining death on Ukraine,

is Britain seriously questioning the money oligarchs have been showering down on them for years. It was pretty obvious what Russia was like by 2018. And yet it was still, you find prime ministers saying, it's time we finally got rid of the dirty money in this country. So it's time now? How was it not time, you know, a decade previously? We have become very dependent, certainly in London, on the fees that this money generates.

We now come to the leader of the opposition, the Right Honourable Keir Starmer. For too long, Britain has been a safe haven for stolen money. Putin thinks that we're too corrupted to do the right thing and put an end to it. Does the Prime Minister agree? Now is the time to sanction every oligarch and crack open every shell company so we can prove Putin wrong? Yes, Mr. Speaker, that's why this government has brought forward the unprecedented measures that we have.

The government of Boris Johnson cancelled the visa program when Russia invaded Ukraine. It banned travel and froze the assets of 24 oligarchs. It will soon launch an anti-corruption police unit. Both political parties, Labor and Conservative, have courted Russian money, but Conservatives have gotten the lion's share, at least $4 million in political donations since 2012, including almost a million dollars from Alexander Tamerko, a former Russian arms tycoon, now a British citizen. He's not on the sanctions list. How can our allies trust this prime minister to clean up dirty Russian money in the UK when he won't even clean up his own political party?

Mr Speaker, I just think it's very important for the House to understand we do not raise money from Russian oligarchs. People who give money to this, to this, to this, they are, we raise money from people who are registered to vote on the UK register of interest. That is, that is how, that is how we do it. But nothing inflamed Johnson's critics more than his 2020 appointment of media mogul Evgeny Lebedev, a dual citizen, to the House of Lords. Our trustee and well-beloved Evgeny Alexandrovich Lebedev. Despite warnings from British security services that the son of an ex-KGB agent posed a security risk, Lord Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia put on his ermine robes.

Now, from his seat, he can watch other British lords race to resign from boards of Russian companies. As you may have noticed, in the last two weeks there's been the most massive bailout of people leaving the boards of Russian companies because it's become socially, quite apart from politically, unacceptable for them to be on it. But in the past, there were plenty of such facilitators around. What made it acceptable before? I mean, there have been one incident after another that should have set up alarm bells. Well, that's certainly my view, because we were concerned about those things

and about the threat, the potential threat that Russia poses to our national security. Former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky told us he thought the sanctions were essential, but not enough. What drives me crazy, he told us, is the cowardice of Western leaders who say we can't do this, we can't do that, because Putin might retaliate. That appeasement is exactly the tactic the West used against Hitler, and that led to millions of lives being lost. Stop Putin! Stop the war! Pressure is building on the oligarchs of Britain. Anti-war demonstrators now call them out. Close Putin ally Roman Abramovich, who was forced to sell his soccer club, may have been poisoned himself in Kyiv.

Industrialist Oleg Deriposky's Belgravia mansion was occupied by squatters in March. Oliver Bulla told us London's dirty secret. It's amoral. It doesn't care. What's at stake here if this continues? I think the really important point to understand is that an oligarch doesn't stop being an oligarch if they fly to the UK. They want the same things in the UK as they want at home, which is they want rigged access to government auctions. They want preferential access to politicians. And I think we need to be very, very risk averse about allowing that to happen here. Because once you set off down that path, it's very hard to come back. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history.

I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Last November, a country with a long, complicated history with the U.S. held its presidential election. Its president was seeking a fourth consecutive term and made sure nothing stood in his way. He changed the country's laws, silenced the media, and locked up candidates who planned to run against him. As we first reported last October, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega is not the fatigue-wearing revolutionary that you may remember. He's now 76 and rarely seen. Still, many Nicaraguans fear he is more dangerous than he's ever been. And tonight, you'll hear from two women whose husbands were planning to challenge Ortega for the presidency. Both men were arrested by the regime more than a year ago, and their

wives haven't seen or spoken to them since. Now, the women are fighting to bring back their husbands and a democracy lost. If you're seeing this, I've been captured. Those were the chilling words of Juan Sebastian Chamorro hours before he was taken from his home by mass police officers in June 2021. Eight police patrols were coming. There was a lot of cars, a lot of noise, a lot of people jumping in our walls. Victoria Cardenas is Juan Sebastian Chamorro's wife. Chamorro was planning to run for president against Daniel Ortega and was considered

a leading candidate. Because of that, Cardenas says, police had been harassing him outside of their home for months. But on June 8th, they came in. He was on the floor with his hands up, saying, I am here, please don't do anything to my wife. We are unarmed. And they jumped the walls. They broke in. And they took him violently. CAT WISE, Cardenas hasn't seen or spoken to him since. Juan Sebastian Chamorro, a Georgetown-educated economist, is part of a prominent political family in Nicaragua. Days earlier, his cousin, Christiana Chamorro, who, coincidentally, was also running for

president, was about to hold a press conference outside her home when police in riot gear showed up. You can see police push the crowd back. Chamorro was placed under house arrest. Over the next two months, Nicaragua's police force detained dozens of critics of the regime, journalists, and ultimately seven of the leading candidates who plan to run for president against Ortega. Jose Miguel Vivanco was a director for Human Rights Watch, a non-profit advocacy group that's been reporting from inside Nicaragua for decades.

A lot of dictators will at least go through the motions of pretending there's a legitimate election. He's not. Ortega's deliberate and flagrant crackdown against peaceful opposition leaders is something without any precedent in Latin America since the 70s and 80s when most of the region was under military dictatorship. What makes it unprecedented? Since Ortega controls Congress, he managed to pass legislation at the end of last year that sanctioned as treason, essentially, any criticism of the government.

So if you criticize the government, you can be thrown in jail right now? The language that they use is any damage to the superior interests of the nation. It sounds Orwellian. Orwellian. It's completely Orwellian. Orwellian. It's completely Orwellian. Last June, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for President Ortega to immediately release the candidates and announce sanctions against members of Ortega's family and inner circle. Until a few years ago, it might have looked like Daniel Ortega had mellowed out with age. A far cry from the revolutionary President Carter

invited to the White House in 1979. Ortega's Sandinista guerrillas were credited with bringing down the Somoza family dictatorship in Nicaragua. Later, they fought off the U.S.-sponsored Contras. In 1984, Daniel Ortega was elected president, and later sat down with our Mike Wallace. Ortega was voted out of office in 1990, but returned to power in 2006, promising to fight corruption.

Instead, he tightened his grip on the country, first changing the constitution so he could serve more terms, then making his wife, Rosario Murillo, an eccentric New Age poet, his vice president. Their children also hold key positions in Nicaragua. Eight of the couple's nine children were made presidential advisors. They oversee a lucrative oil distribution business and most of the country's TV channels. But even as the Ortega family's wealth has exploded, Nicaragua remains the second poorest country

in the Western Hemisphere. In 2018, Nicaraguans revolted. Thousands took to the streets to protest Ortega's proposed cuts to Social Security for senior citizens. Soon, protesters were calling for Ortega and his wife to step down. Jose Miguel Vivanco says it was a turning point for the country. That demonstration was confronted with brutal force by Ortega. Thousands of people were injured, more than 700 were arrested, and at least 350 people were killed by police or paramilitary groups supported by the Nicaraguan government.

All of those crimes, all of those atrocities committed by Ortega and his security forces just a couple of years ago, he was able to get away with those crimes. But Vivanco says Ortega also realized that if he lost power, he might be imprisoned for what Nicaraguan journalists called a massacre of protesters. Very few people around the world doubt that Nicaragua is a dictatorship. Felix Maradiaga, a former cabinet member, was one of Ortega's most outspoken critics. A graduate of Harvard, he addressed world leaders at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy in 2019. I come here with the conviction and hope that the world will continue to support the struggle of my people to build a free and open society. Felix Maradiaga was teaching nonviolent activism to Nicaraguan students when witnesses say

he was beaten by Ortega's henchmen in 2018. After this attack, Maradiaga was hospitalized. For the next few years, he was under constant surveillance by the police, according to his wife, Berta Valle. They watched him. They put patrols in front of his house. The police would tell him that he was not able to go out of the house. And from December 2020 to February 21, he was under house arrest. So no warrant, but he's not allowed to leave the house. Exactly.

Even so, Felix Maradiaga decided he would run for president, one of a group of opposition candidates who, for the first time, had decided to band together to try to defeat Daniel Ortega. They signed a document saying that they were willing to support the one that could represent the Nicaraguan people. But the opposition never got the chance to put their candidate forward. Most were arrested or fled the country before they could file the paperwork to officially put them on the ballot. On June 8th, 2021, Felix Maradiaga was summoned

to meet with government prosecutors. His family feared he would be arrested during the meeting. So he went with a lawyer, a friend, and he was interviewed for four hours. So Felix came out, he talked to the independent press. We were watching this live, and we said, oh, thanks God, he came out, he's okay, he's going to take the car and he's going to leave. His attorney says they were driving away when Mara Diago was dragged out of the car and beaten by police.

His wife hasn't seen him since that morning in June. It turns out Maradiaga knew he was in danger. Hours before his arrest, he left his daughter, Alejandra, a series of videos so she would hear his voice in case he wasn't there for her eighth birthday. I'm thinking of you on your birthday, he says, and tells her, I love you. She and her mother have been living in the United States for three years because of threats at home and are now applying for asylum. He concealed Alejandra's identity for her safety. I want to go see my dog, my family. I have a cat and a dog. In August, we met Berta Valle and Victoria Cardenas in Washington, where they'd been petitioning U.S. lawmakers to help free their husbands

and about 150 other political prisoners in Nicaragua. And we're demanding justice. At that point, the men had disappeared. No one had heard from them or seen them in two months. Do you believe that he's still alive? That's what I want to believe. You know, we have the hope that he's okay, but we don't know. And that's why we are asking for a proof of life to this point. And this is why we are doing all this effort to come out

and to call to the international community because there's nothing we can do in Nicaragua. Last September, 87 days after their arrest, attorneys for Felix Maradiaga and Juan Sebastian Chamorro were allowed to briefly see them at El Chapote, the Nicaraguan prison that's been described by human rights workers as a dungeon. Both men were charged with, quote, conspiracy to undermine the national integrity at a closed hearing in the jail.

Attorneys say both Chamorro and Maradiaga have lost significant weight and been subjected to months of interrogations and psychological torture. It's a violation of the basic human rights. It's not only my family who is suffering. It's more than 140 families who have political prisoners who are innocent and are living this awful situation. Victoria Cardenas and Berta Valle cannot go back to Nicaragua. Because of their appeals for help to Washington

and the international community, the women have been charged in absentia with being traitors to the homeland. So what would happen if you went back to Nicaragua now? Would you be arrested? Definitely, yes. Not only arrested, but if they condemned me, that would be life prison.

The violence in Nicaragua is fueling an exodus. Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans have fled to Costa Rica, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection says about 38,000 Nicaraguans reached the U.S. border last summer, compared to less than 800 people over the same time, the International Monetary Fund approved sending more than $350 million to Nicaragua if supposed to help fight hunger and COVID. What do you think they're going to give that money to, just to put these people in jail and torture them even more? In September, members of Congress from both parties demanded the IMF reconsider sending more money to Nicaragua. This is just not acceptable. And called for stronger sanctions against Ortega. The Pentagon has also warned Congress that Russia has been supplying Nicaragua

with millions of dollars in military equipment and training, and that Ortega has allowed Russia to build a listening station so close to the U.S. Haven't we heard this story before? This all sounds very familiar. It is. Going back 35 years to the middle ofS. Haven't we heard this story before? This all sounds very familiar. It is. Going back 35 years to the middle of a Cold War, that is unfortunately the scenario where, you know, we are operating, we are living now. Jose Miguel Vivanco says with Russia's continued military and financial support, U.S. sanctions will not be enough to convince Daniel Ortega to change course. Ortega has decided to

stay in power for the rest of his life. Since our story first aired, Felix Maradiaga and Juan Sebastian Chamorro were tried by the Ortega regime inside the El Chipote prison. They were each sentenced to 13 years in what has been widely criticized as a sham trial. of payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. Look across the landscape of late-night television, and you'll see that most of the hosts are white men in their 40s and 50s, but not Trevor Noah. He's biracial, he's not American, and he's only 38. But he's a certified celebrity with a global following who has brought an international dimension to Comedy Central's The Daily Show. He's from South Africa, where he grew up under apartheid. He called his memoir Born a Crime because it was illegal for a black woman, like his mother, and a white man, like his father, to mix. As we first reported in December, Trevor says he's always felt like an outsider. But his humor, making people laugh, has been his ticket to belonging. Trevor Noah is back on tour with his comedy show

in a different city practically every weekend. Yeah, like when you're in Texas, they'd be like, you got any weapons in the vehicle? You're like, no, sir. They're like, all right, here's one. Here you go. You all have a good night now. He loves owning the stage, the roar of the big crowd, typically 15,000 in giant arenas like this one in Washington, D.C. All right, here we go. We're about to start taping our monologue. It's a far cry from his more confined TV studio day job on The Daily Show, where he had a shaky start when he took over six years ago from Jon Stewart. And now it feels like the family has a new stepdad.

And he's black. Was it a good decision? Terrible initially. I know. Awful. Don't take The Daily Show, Leslie. When they offer it to you, whatever you do, don't take The Daily Show.

What happened in the beginning? Oh, I mean, everybody hated me. People didn't even know me and they hated the idea of me. But you did have a savior. Donald Trump. Once you realize that Trump is basically the perfect African president, you start to notice the similarities everywhere. Once he found his foil,

The secret document that I... his ratings began to improve, and he realized he could connect American politics to his background in South Africa. He grew up in Johannesburg and its black township of Soweto during the strict racial separation regime of apartheid. He always felt like an outsider, not quite black like his Xhosa mother, not quite white like his Swiss father, who he has seen infrequently in his life. To be with your father who was white, that was a crime. Yeah. This was the law that forbade anybody of different races from mixing. There's something I heard, I'm not sure I believe it, but your grandfather used to call you Master?

Yeah. Because of the color of your skin? That's how he referred to me. Master. And he'd always force me to sit in the back of the car. Be like, Master, what can the police say if I say the master is sitting with me? Your parents, your grandmother particularly,

was always afraid the police were going to come and find you. What would have happened if they found you? I probably would have been taken away to an orphanage. No. Yeah. Your grandmother was always hiding you. Yes. You were in lockdown.

Right. I was in pandemic before pandemic even existed. But you were poor. You write in your book about eating worms and having a toy that was a brick. Here's the thing that I always say to people. Being poor in a group or in a community that is poor is not as bad as being poor when you know what you're missing out on. So when I grew up, we played with bricks as cars, and you'd smash them into each other, and it was one of the most fun games I've ever played. The same thing with eating mopani worms. What I didn't like was when we couldn't eat anything else, and my mom said,

we're going to have to eat these mopani worms for longer because we don't have money to buy chicken. Spending time indoors, he became a voracious reader. He wrote about his mother, Patricia Noah, in his memoir, Born a Crime, saying she raised him almost as if he was white, with no limitations on what he could achieve. He wrote it was just the two of them, him and his mom, against the world. But then she married a man named Abel, who he said beat up his mother, then the bullet went out clean. And my mom looks at me and she goes, Shh, Trevor, Trevor, shh, don't cry, baby. I said, No, Mom, I'm going to cry. You were shot in the head.

She says, No, no, no, no. Look on the bright side. I said, What bright side? She says, No, at least now because of my nose, you're officially the best-looking person in the family. You did say you had the black world and you had the white world, and this is a quote from you. All I wanted to do was belong. Everybody wants to belong. Half of our fights in life are because we want to belong. And so I grew up in a country where I was told that your belonging was defined by the shade of the color of your skin. And that never worked for

me. You know, I found my greatest joy was with the people where we shared interests and the way we spoke and the way we laughed, et cetera. So I always wanted to belong. And that, I think, has been a gift and a curse in life. I have a funny feeling that you did belong because you were funny. Funny is something that I developed as a tool, yeah, to belong.

He was funny back in Johannesburg, but became a professional comedian by accident when he was 22 and took the stage at a comedy club on a dare from his cousin. Yeah, you laugh, but it's true, because I'm like mixed, you know. I've got like a percentage share, like it's that type of thing. He killed it, gave up his plan to go to college, and soon was touring all over the world as a stand-up comic. According to Forbes, he's one of the highest paid comedians today. He first started touring the United States in 2011, and a year later...

From the time I was a young child, I've always wanted one thing, and that is, I've always wanted to be black. He was on The Tonight Show and caught the attention of Jon Stewart's producer at The Daily Show, a ViacomCBS property. When he was eventually offered the host chair, he said it would have meant taking a pay cut and giving up his life on the road. So Stewart had to talk him into it. He said, I'm not offering you the glitz and glam of your life. I'm offering you a home for a while that I think you will come to enjoy. That intrigued me. I was like, I've always wanted to have home. I've always wanted to belong. And so I thought, well, this could be the chance. From Trevor's couch in New York City. And the chance to weigh in on serious topics. When COVID hit and he was broadcasting from

his apartment, nearly 11 million people watched his monologue on race and George Floyd. There was a black man on the ground in handcuffs, and you could take his life so you did, almost knowing that there would be no ramifications. And it wasn't funny. And now we have a new dimension to Trevor. I guess. I guess you've seen a different dimension to Trevor. I've always had the different dimension.

Well, you showed it to the public. That's true. Some of the funniest people we know on the planet have depression. You come to mind. Well, I think over the years what I've come to learn, thanks to some great therapists, is my depression is created by a severe level of ADHD. ADHD looks like depression?

What do you mean? So it can be different for different people. So for myself, it means that if I'm not careful in how I sleep, how I eat, how I manage my routine, I can become overwhelmed and it can just feel like the whole world is just too heavy to bear. You said something that sticks with me. You said it wasn't until you came to the United States that real hate started coming at you. Oh, yeah, definitely. What was the hate that you felt?

Did the cops ever stop you? I've been pulled over quite frequently by the cops, yeah. One of my best friends, David Meyer, you know, would drive all over the West Coast to these comedy shows. If I was driving, we would get pulled over. And if he was driving? And then he would drive, we wouldn't get pulled over. But you did say you experienced hate. Yes, but I mean, that's welcome to America, you know?

That's harsh. Yeah. There's a lot of hate in America because there's a lot of anger in America. How is it changing you? For me, I'm always trying to figure out how do I speak to somebody who hates me? This is where we are for now. Because of his childhood, growing up between two different worlds, he tends to see both sides of an argument.

Take his reaction to the trouble his friend, comedian Dave Chappelle, got in over his Netflix special, The Closer, that was criticized as homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic. In your mind, did he cross the line? Did Dave Chappelle cross the line? Yes, no. It immediately puts me in a position where I have to choose a side when I think that the matter is a lot more complex than that. I think everybody is defining the line for themselves. No, society defines a line. You see what you're saying now is you're saying society has decided, but America is clearly divided in that half of society has gone like, no,

Dave Chappelle, we love what you said. We're sick of wokeness. We're sick of people being told what to say. We're sick of not knowing how to use the right pronoun. You're right, Dave Chappelle. So then if half of society is saying Dave Chappelle is right and half of society is saying that he's wrong, then that means there is no line. It means society is seeing the line from two different sides. And so that's why I say you cannot say, did he cross the line? Because which side are you looking at the line from defines whether or not he crossed it. Are you still learning things all the time? Yes. Well, he's had to learn about New York City,

his new home since 2015, buy an apartment here, make new friends. Let me ask you about your personal life for a minute. Do you want to have children? I go back and forth. Sometimes I will meet kids who make me go, I want a kid. And then sometimes I'll meet children where I go,

I hope that my sperm doesn't do anything because this person is a terror. You're 37. You're right there. That's the clock. It's ticking. But you don't feel it. No, I don't. You have a girlfriend now. Maybe. Well, I read page six like everybody else in this room. The tabloids. You don't like to talk about your girlfriends.

No. What is Trevor like with his girlfriends? It's a trick. You don't have to answer that question. Yes, he does. Trevor introduced us to comedy producer Ryan Harduth and comedian David Kibuka, now a supervising producer on The Daily Show. They're among his oldest friends from South Africa. You don't have to answer any questions about personal relationships. Well, who told you that?

Okay, what is Mitch McConnell like with his girlfriends? Do you know the answer to that question? I don't know. Exactly. Because he didn't answer it. Because they don't even ask him. And also because people don't want to know. This is what I'll say about Trevor with his girlfriends.

So you're just fully going ahead with it? Of course he is. Is that he is very, very, like a great boyfriend. So what are the qualities that you like most about Trevor? He's a great boyfriend. Yeah. Trevor told us he hangs out with these guys often and talks with his mother every day,

things he says that keep him grounded. Is he a perfectionist? No, I wouldn't say he's a perfectionist. Workaholic? Yes. Yes, I would say so. 100%. He sure is.

Even though he does the Daily Show during the week and has hosted the Grammy Awards for the past two years, he refuses to give up his comedy shows. Genuinely, I just love the feeling of a laugh. I think when we laugh as human beings, that's when we're our most authentic selves. That's why your real laugh is so ugly. Do you know what I mean? It's not filtered

in any way. I love that. It's like pure joy. Forget what people think. Just laugh, you know? We need it. Every single day. Every single day. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.