The Daily Beast Podcast - How Trump Made This Liberal Comedian Conservative

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

Michael Ian Black celebrates July 4th with Joanna Coles and explains his reluctant transformation into what he jokingly calls “a conservative”—thanks to Donald Trump. The comedian and Daily Beast columnist describes how defending the IRS, foreign aid, and the post office over dinner with a Trump voter made him feel like he’d become “the man.” But it's not age that’s made him more conservative—it’s Trump’s destruction of public service, empathy, and the common good. Black traces his unlikely journey from straight-edge punk rocker to champion of bureaucracy, arguing that helping people shouldn’t be a radical act. He calls Trump “the worst thing for comedy” and slams the administration’s cruelty as both unfunny and un-American. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The post office, the goddamn post office that they want to privatize. That's in the Constitution. They talk about the post office lost such and such billions of dollars last year, to which I always feel like saying, who gives a shit? I'm Joanna Cole's chief content officer of The Daily Beast. This is the Daily Beast podcast, and it's the perfect thing to listen to this weekend as you prepare your patties, as you get your fireworks ready as you put the beer in the cooler, because it's an interview with a comedian Michael Ian Black.

It's a really fun interview based on his column for us on how he has become, well, how Donald Trump has driven him to be a conservative, but it's not quite what it sounds. So, no further ado, let's get to it. So Michael Ian Black, our columnist at The Daily Beast, has written a very funny piece which will never... I prefer to be called a star columnist at the Daily Beast. Thank you.

Michael Liam Black are star columnist at The Daily Beast, has written a piece that has gotten people very excited. It's very funny about how Donald Trump has made you a conservative. Sir, please explain. Well, I found myself at dinner in Las Vegas with a friend of mine who I don't know very well. We were sort of recent friends. And we'd certainly never had a political conversation before. So we're having dinner. It turns out he voted for Trump. And then we had ourselves a spirited conversation about that fact. And I found myself defending the institutions, the storied institutions of this nation. I found myself defending such things as the IRS.

Which is not what comedians are supposed to do. That's not what we do. That's not at all what we do. We're supposed to be iconoclasts. And here I am standing up for the faceless bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., administering foreign aid and all the good things that the American government has traditionally done up until this moment. And so I find myself sort of acting as a reactionary in a weird way to my friend who voted for Trump. And I realized, my God, I'm a conservative now. And it was very, very upsetting for me to make this realization. And also, I'm sure you were a punk rocker when you were much younger. I was the lead singer of a hardcore punk band in my high school days. And, you know, I was straight edge. What was the title? Michael, what was the title?

Of the band. Yes. It was ironically titled The Pleased. Of course it was called The Pleased. Of course. So funny. Right. And so all these years later, here I am, just standing up for the man.

I don't want to stand up for the man. what choice do I have right now? It's terrible. So you're standing up for the man. You've figured out that you're a conservative. And Donald Trump almost led you to leave America, right? And you went off to France. So my wife and I, a couple of years ago, spent six months living abroad. We lived in Rome and we lived in London. And we were like, oh, this is particularly Rome. We were like, oh, this is a better way to live. And so this was during or maybe right before the election campaign kicked off. And when we came back to the States, we thought, well, maybe we should abandon our American lives and go live in a different, more socialist way. Because I'm a communist at heart. Right. A communist conservative. Right.

No. And so we decided against Italy because. I don't know if you've spent any time in Italy, but as lovely as it is, the Italian bureaucracy of just getting anything done, it's very challenging, especially if you don't speak the language, and especially if you don't have connections,

if you know what I mean. There's a whole thing in the south of Italy where you've got to hire a dude who sort of just greases the wheels for everywhere that you go, and I'm like, I just want to deal with that. So my wife speaks French. we were like, well, we could move to France. It's lovely there. And we decided we're going to move to France, regardless of who won the election. And then when Donald Trump won, we thought, we're so glad we decided to move to France. And then we, in January of this year, we decamped for France, spent an entire month driving around France, at the end of which we decided, yeah, we're not moving to France.

So you moved back to Savannah where you live now. And we're frankly, although the only insight I've had into your home is the lovely picture of what looks like your kitchen behind you. But I can't imagine why you would leave Savannah and that gorgeous kitchen for anywhere else. Well, so this isn't my kitchen. I rented this kitchen for this podcast. I just thought Joanna deserves the best. So let me get a Nancy Myers-style kitchen. Money well spent, Michael.

Money well spent. No, I got invited to host some things at the Nantucket Film Festival. So I just moved to Nantucket. So this is a guest cottage behind me, my own kitchen. My own Savannah kitchen, while nice, isn't quite as. But I remember your Savannah kitchen looking pretty good last time we did a podcast from there. And Savannah is a lovely city. If you've never been there, you or your listeners.

I have loved Savannah. I love Savannah. I came to the Savannah Book Festival earlier this year, but you were in France. Otherwise, I would have taken you out for dinner. Yes. And it's a great, it's a historic, lovely city, a great, great, like, long weekend city. If you're looking for someplace to go to wander, romantic streets. And particularly this time of year, if you have water weight, you're looking to shed. It's the ideal location. Are you saying I look as if I have water weight?

I was not referring to you specifically. I was just saying if one wants to sweat a lot. This is the perfect. time to come to Savannah. You can do that in New York. But yes, Joanna, you could drop a few pounds. Okay. All right. So I'm very happy to come down and try Savannah again. That sounds good. Michael, hold that thought. We're coming back in a second. We just need to stop for some messages. And we're back now with Michael Ian Black. So let me take you back to this essay you've written about conservatism and standing up for the things that you believe in, all the things that you railed against as a young man and thought you would never come to support. Is this, in fact, just the typical journey that Robert Frost talked about,

that you have to be radical when you're a youth because otherwise you won't become a conservative as you get older? Or is this actually inspired by Donald Trump and what's happening with the administration? So I think those are kind of two different questions. The first is, do people naturally become more conservative as they age? And I don't think that's necessarily the path that I have walked. It certainly isn't.

Like, I still consider myself, in fact, the older I get, sort of the more liberal I get and sort of the more socialist, I guess, I get. And it's because the older I get, the more I appreciate the notion of the common good and also the notion of public service. And the reason that I was sort of, I sort of jokingly refer to myself as a conservative in the piece that's coming out is because, the public good and public service are inherently conservative ideas in the sense that you're looking to preserve, celebrate, and accentuate that which we do well in our commonality as a citizenry. That's really important. and the kind of punk rock ethos that we're sort of jokingly talking about is all about do it yourself do it do it do yourself in the sense that as a community we can come together

and do things now the community that we have formed as a nation is in fact the federal government and as much as we may rail against the federal government for the bad things that they do what we've seen this administration do which gets to the second part part of your question, is take a sledgehammer to those things which I find most valuable about our country. Tolerance, inclusivity, helping the less fortunate, standing up for the rights of the oppressed, generosity, munificence, like all of these things to me embody what my sort of natural punk rock ethos is. And punk, you know, punk rock obviously isn't the opposite of conservative, but for the

for the purposes of this conversation, it will have to do. And it's that idea of, of being in a mosh pit and somebody falls and you pick them up. That's my entire ethos as a human. You pick up the person in the mosh pit. But you also have to get into the mosh pit, which means you have to be willing to fight. You have to be willing to, like, use your elbows. at times. Not to hurt people, but if somebody's teeth get in the way of your elbows, so be it. And if they fall, you pick them up. To me, and somehow that is now a conservative position.

Helping people, to me, is just what humans are supposed to do. Well, an education and science and things that we automatically assumed somehow pushed us forward on the road to progress. The post office, the goddamn post office that they want to privatize. That's in the Constitution. And what's so maddening about it is they always talk about it. And the post office, I think, is a sort of good example of this philosophy that they have, which is they talk about the post office lost such and such billions of dollars last year,

to which I always feel like saying, who gives a shit? Like, what do we care if the post office makes money? That's not their function. The post office need not make money. Just like I feel like Amtrak need not make money. These are services for the public. These are for the public good. If they can recoup some of their money, great.

If they can operate sort of, you know, fag, great. But if they lose a few billion dollars, who cares? The Pentagon spends $10 billion on Oakley sunglasses every year and nobody's, the Pentagon needs to turn a profit, you know? It's that kind of thing that just drives me crazy because it's so, it's so short-sighted, it's so callous for the sake of callousness. It makes no sense. It makes no financial sense because it's going to end up costing people more when you privatize all these services than you would then you would by just sort of spreading out the payment among the entire citizen.

It drives me crazy. So talk about the role of the comedian in the age of Donald Trump, which sometimes you wake up and you just think this is unpariodibular. unparadable, whatever the word is, incapable of parody. It's a word for that. It's been, the natural inclination for people, I think, not in comedy, is to go, oh, Donald Trump's so great for comedy. And he's not, it's, he's the worst thing for comedy, for a few reasons. The first is because he's such a dominant figure in the culture that there's an expectation

that, of course, you're going to talk about this dude, but there's also the sense of, I don't want to hear anything else about this guy. Like, there's such a saturation, a super saturation in the culture of this doofus, of this loser, that as a comedian, it's like you want to talk about anything else. You know, on the show that I'm on,

have I got news for you, which you participated? Yeah, the very funny CNN show, based on a British show, I'm here. Based on the British show. well it is the British show just with an American accent basically and we every week we struggle because the story that's dominating the news is this dipshit and it's sort of like it would be irresponsible not to talk about it but nobody wants to talk about it

it's just it's just annoying and the other reason is he's not a this is going to sound odd maybe to somebody not in in comedy he's not a funny person. He himself is not funny. He doesn't say funny things. He has no sense of humor. And I mean that literally. The only time you ever see him making a joke is when he's being mean to somebody. That is his idea of humor. He's just insulting somebody, demeaning, belittling, putting down, coming up with a like dumb ass nickname. To him, that's humor. But he's never self-deprecating. He's never said anything particularly clever or witty, he doesn't seem to have wit

or understand wit, and it seems to offend him. And as a comedian, it's like, you can't be meaner than he is. Pointing out his stupidity is just sort of trite. Like, I don't know where you go with this guy. I don't know, I don't want to talk about him. I don't think most comedians want to talk about him.

And, you know, the sooner we don't have to talk about him anymore, the better it will be for comedy. What about the people around him? Because some of them seem interesting characters. Pete Higgseth, the defense secretary, seems slightly more parodyable. Yeah, yeah. Sure. I feel like you might be able to do a good impression of him, actually, if you dressed up.

Who does an impression? I could. Well, I know you're not an impressionist, but I feel like. And I don't drink very much. But you've got a kind of five o'clock shadow. And I feel like if you put the suit on. Well, I was up at 4 o'clock this morning to catch my. flight, so I didn't shake.

But yeah, I could see it. Maybe from this angle, I look a little more Heg-Sethian. You look more Heg-Sethian than you do Trumpian, and I feel like with the right pocket square and the right striped socks, stars and striped socks, you could pull off a hexat. I just want to jut my chin-forward a little and seem a little angrier than I normally am. And use the word obliterate several times. Obliterate?

Why do you, insomple president, by not saying the pilots obliterated the target? He's annoying. What about J.D. Vance also seems parodiable. Yeah, I mean, they're all parodyable, but it's like, I mean, I'm sorry for taking it this far, but it's like, do you really want to see a Herman Gehring impersonation? It's like, you know, do you want to see a Pol Pot impersonation? Not particularly. Right. And I'm not saying, I'm not saying these guys are history's worst monsters. I am not saying that. But would they like to be history's worst monsters? Yeah, I think they would be.

I think they'd be very content to be lumped in with those people. I just don't know if they have the chutzpah to go that far. Well, let's hope they don't have the chutzpah to go that far. Michael Ian Black, your column is excellent. Recommend it to everybody. Thank you for joining us. And I can't wait for the next season of Have I Got News for you, which comes back on CNN in September, I believe.

I hope you'll come back on it and dazzle us with your wit again. Well, I hope I do too. and if I do, I want to be on your team. Although last time we had Amber Ruffin on the podcast, she immediately got fired from the White House Correspondence Dinner. So I hope no such thing befalls you. Well, yeah, but I didn't call them, I didn't call them the Republicans' murderers.

I just compared them to Pol Pot and Herman together. Yeah, okay. Have fun in Nantucket. And your column is essential reading. We are all conservatives now. That's why I am a star columnist for the Daily Beast. All right. Thank you very much.

That was perfect. Absolutely perfect. So there you have it. A 1990s liberal who was railing against the man who sang in a punk rock band, now finding himself defending because of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, all the institutions he once railed against. And now he calls himself quite proudly a conservative. Everything you know is upside down.

But it's July the 4th. weekend. So enjoy your burger, enjoy your beer. Don't forget to subscribe to the Daily Beast podcast. Leave us a comment on YouTube about what you think of Michael's journey. Have you had a similar journey, especially as you reflect on it and what July the 4th means this weekend? Don't forget to share the podcast with your friend. And for second by second updates on the crazy that's going on, you can check it out on the Daily Beast website or our app. Don't forget to be Beast. And this podcast was produced. by Devin Rodgerino, Anna von Erson, and it was edited by Jesse Milwood.

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