Jerry Springer Says His Wild Talk Show Guests Prepared Us For Trump — With Key Difference

Legendary daytime talk show host Jerry Springer and his collection of sobbing, screaming, bickering, cursing guests prepared us for Donald Trump, he said in an interview Friday.

The behavior of his motley parade of guests was “exactly like Donald Trump,” Springer told SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah. But they had the “sense not to run for president,” he added, deadpan.

Springer was responding to Obeidallah’s question about the impact of his syndicated tabloid TV talk show that ran from 1991 to 2018, and blew the lid off comportment expected from TV guests. (His podcast, started in 2015, lives on.)

“Do you see a line between the success of ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ ... and the way people look at TV and what people let people get away with?” Obeidallah asked. “Do you think that on some level ... it contributed to people accepting someone like Donald Trump?”

Springer responded: “Probably social media more — but, yes, there’s no question. The behavior of some of the people on the show is exactly Donald Trump. The reason there’s more respect given to the people who were on my show, is they have enough sense not to run for president.”

He said his guests let “their emotions out” and didn’t speak “the Queen’s English.” When they get angry, they ... “curse and they yell and sometimes fight; they don’t have the skills to settle things in different ways. That’s Trump,” Springer added.

But what “made Trump unique — the only thing that separates him from the guests on my show — is the fact that he had this delusion [that] he knew how to run the world and run the country. When in fact he knows ... nothing about how you run a country, and we paid the price for that,” Springer added.

Check out the full interview up top.