Stand-up comeidan Jim Gaffigan dialed the calendar to 2020 when he posted criticisms of Donald Trump on Twitter, now known as X.
Gaffigan said he regrets that Trump supporters took those criticisms seriously.
“I regret that people think that I was criticizing people that support Trump. And that was never the intention,” Gaffigan told The Daily Beast. “I regret – someone said like, now I can’t follow you anymore and I kind of said ‘F you’ to them.”
Most recently, Gaffigan played Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and former Democratic vice presidential nominee on “Saturday Night Live.”
Back in 2020 when Trump was running for reelection, the comedian posted a series of tweets
“Look Trumpers I get it. As a kid I was a cubs fan and I know you stick by your team no matter what but he’s a traitor and a con man who doesn’t care about you,” he wrote in one post. “Deep down you know it. I’m sure you enjoy pissing people off but you know Trump is a liar and a criminal.”
He criticized Trump in another post for how he handled the COVID-19 pandemic.
“You know Trump just creates enemies. You know you can’t trust him. You know he been incompetent during this crisis,” Gaffigan posted. “You know all those people didn’t need to die. Trump talks about the Space Program and you can’t safely go to a movie. Wake up.”
Even though Gaffigan regrets how Trump supporters took the tweets, he does not regret posting them.
Four years later, Gaffigan told the outlet his regrets about how the posts were taken by some people, but insisted he doesn’t regret posting them.
“But it’s weird because I think authenticity is really an important thing, not only as a comedian, but also with your children,” he said. “For me, I don’t regret it, but I also do acknowledge that there are true die-hard Trump fans who probably enjoyed my comedy, but because they feel so passionately will never forgive me.”
Gaffigan, however, said being a comedian and alienating some people go hand in hand.
“But also, something I’ve noticed in doing stand-up for so long is, you’re going to lose people,” he said. “You’re also going to attract people. But there are going to be people who are like, you know, ‘I don’t have kids, I think he’s funny, but I don’t get this.’”
He also could not quantify how many fans he may have lost because of the tweets.
“I wouldn’t say it was measurable. But there were definitely comments on social media, and there are still some,” he wrote. “My son, who’s so funny — I posted something, and my 18-year-old son commented, ‘I liked him until he went on his Trump rant.’”
He also talked about the criticism he got for performing at the recent Al Smith Dinner.
Gaffigan took shots at Trump and at Vice President Kamala Harris.
He said he was accused him of making light of Trump in the routine.
“I was ‘normalizing a fascist,’ right? I knew going into it that I was going to get criticism from both sides. I’m not a roast comedian. I mean, I love politics, but I just don’t talk about it,” he said.
“So I knew that if I did jokes about either side that there was going to be some blowback. But I also thought it was worth it,” Gaffigan added.
