“I don’t know how I would have handled that. I’m glad I didn’t have to, to be honest,” Craig Ferguson said of the contemporary political landscape.

Former late-night host isn’t sure he could have navigated Trump’s presidency

"I don't know how I would have handled that. I'm glad I didn't have to, to be honest," Craig Ferguson said of the contemporary political landscape.

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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June 9, 2026 9:07 p.m. ET

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Craig Ferguson and President Donald Trump. Credit:

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty; Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty

- Craig Ferguson said he doesn't know "how I would have handled" hosting a late-night show in the Trump era.

- "I'm glad I didn't have to, to be honest," he added.

- The former *Late Late Show* host said that he "didn't set out in my life to be a late-night host."

Craig Ferguson doesn't know how his version of *The Late Late Show* would have fared in the Trump era.

The former late-night host recently spoke with the Daily Beast's *Obsessed: The Podcast* to discuss how the contemporary political landscape has affected talk shows and said he didn't have a clue how he would have handled the contemporary political climate.

"You know, it's hard to say," Ferguson said. "I've thought about it before. It's kind of impossible to say. I like to think I would somehow have managed to navigate through it, but I'm not sure I would have. I don't know how I would have handled that. I'm glad I didn't have to, to be honest."

Ferguson thinks late night has transformed in the Trump era.

"The shows are something different [now]," he said. "And would I have been dragged into making my show more like a late-night show? I don't know. I mean, I really don't know."

The Scottish comedian hosted *The Late Late Show* from 2005 to 2014 — and he said he stayed on the air for a longer period of time than he expected.

"Comedy, like everything else in life, really is about timing," he said. "And I felt I actually was going to leave like three years or something before I actually left. But they throw a bit of money at you, you stay a little longer. And then, and then it's like, 'All right, enough's enough.'"

Craig Ferguson on 'The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson'.

Monty Brinton/CBS

Despite having a nightly slot in CBS' lineup for a decade, Ferguson still considers himself an outsider in the late-night world.

"I probably know less about late-night TV than everybody else," he said. "My perception is that I became a late-night host the way that people become realtors. I didn't set out in my life to be a late-night host. I didn't grow up to be, you know, think at all, 'One day I'm gonna have a desk and do a late-night television show.' I grew up in a different country. We didn't have that. So I didn't grow up with that archetype. I wasn't drawn to that."

Ferguson explained that he answered to David Letterman's company Worldwide Pants more than he did to CBS, which meant he had a degree of freedom that he believes would be impossible to achieve in 2026.

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"They were paying me to do a show that they weren't paying any attention to," he said of the network. "So I existed in this strange kind of autonomous bubble, sitting behind the mighty shoulders of David Letterman."

That distinction meant that Ferguson never felt that he was "part of a fraternity" with other late-night hosts.

"I remember saying that at the time: 'I'm not part of this,'" he recalled. "I mean, I used to say, on the show, 'This is not a late-night talk show. I'm not a late-night talk show host.' And I said that a lot on the show. Now, it's hard for people to understand that if it was a late-night talk show that was going out late at night, and I was talking on it. But in the sense that it was an archetype like the others, I don't believe that it was."

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Because of his self-described outsider status, Ferguson doesn't think that he can speak to the broader dynamics of the late-night landscape.

"I don't feel that my trajectory through that period gives me any insight into what's either going on now or what went on before," he said. "It's not like I was hanging around with other late-night hosts or anything like that. We didn't all live in the same house."

You can listen to Ferguson's full interview with *Obsessed* above.

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