Last year, Louis C.K. compared President Donald Trump to Hitler in an email to fans. On Tuesday, he told Stephen Colbert that he regrets making the comparison.
“Why do you regret it?” Colbert asked. “You’ve said worse things and not taken them back.”
“I don’t take it back, I regret it,” C.K. clarified. “There’s a difference.”
“I regret saying it. It doesn’t mean it’s not true,” C.K. continued. “It’s a messy thing, you know? It’s how I was feeling at the time and I said it — to a lot of people. It just was more people than I thought were going to read it.”
The comment was part of a post-script the comedian included in a March 2016 installment of the weekly subscriber email he used to keep fans posted about episodes of his Web series “Horace and Pete.” But the email, which also implored fans to “stop it with voting for Trump” during the primaries, shocked many who felt it was out of character for the comedian to take such a partisan stand. It also landed C.K. on on the cover of the New York Daily News.
“I’m like, ‘Oh God,’” C.K recalled. “That’s not what I do for a living. That’s not what I’m trying to accomplish.”
But C.K., currently promoting his Netflix stand-up comedy special, still has some tough criticism for the president. And he didn’t mince words.
“Now, I guess he’s not as profound as I thought he was,” he told Colbert. “I thought he was some new kind of evil, but he’s just a lying sack of s—.”
After offering a detailed breakdown of various types of liars, C.K. revised that description. “He’s just a gross crook dirty rotten lying sack of s—.”