For those who’ve tracked Donald Trump’s speeches over the past decade, the patter that unfolded in Pennsylvania on Monday evening was very familiar. An attack on a Democrat that shifted into a discussion of television ratings that ended at praise for an icon of the 1980s. We could create a slot-machine-style Trump Speech Generator with various names filling those slots — [spin] Hillary Clinton could never get ratings on [spin] “The View” the way [spin] David Hasselhoff could — and yield something that could slip into a Trump speech without raising eyebrows.
But there was something unusual about Trump’s riff on Monday: The 1980s callback was actually to someone who Americans would agree deserved the recognition. It may have been happenstance, but Trump’s nostalgia for the era when he dominated the New York City tabloids caused him to dredge up a name for which many Americans would have similar feelings.
The name was Johnny Carson, but it took a while for Trump to get there. First he played a clip of [spin] Vice President Kamala Harris appearing on “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon — a clip that Fox News touted this week as having been “unearthed,” as if “The Tonight Show” is some ancient civilization that lies buried at the bottom of the sea.
Trump then transitioned to a comment about how [spin] Fox News host Greg Gutfeld was clobbering Fallon and other late-night hosts (like CBS’s Stephen Colbert and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel) in the ratings. This is overly generous to Gutfeld, in part because Gutfeld is in prime time. Obviously Trump doesn’t care.
Then the former president started talking about the time he was on Fallon’s show and Fallon messed around with his hair.
“I went on his show, right? And he goes — ‘The Tonight Show,’ which is dying,” Trump said. “They’re all dying. Where’s Johnny Carson? Bring back Johnny!” ([spin], etc.)
He shouted out a guy in the audience who was apparently dressed like Uncle Sam before returning to his tangent.
“It made you appreciate the greatness of Johnny Carson and these guys,” he said. “These three guys, they’re so bad, all three of them.”
When this clip was shared on social media, there was a lot of eye-rolling about another out-of-date reference from Trump. But this one is perhaps less out of date than it may seem.
We should answer Trump’s “where’s Johnny Carson” question by noting that the former “Tonight Show” host is dead and has been for nearly two decades. He hadn’t been the host of the show since 1992 — more than 30 years ago.
But 6 in 10 Americans were alive while the Carson-hosted show was on the air. Some of them were too little to watch it, much less appreciate it, but half of the country was at least 8 years old when Carson called it quits. About 80 percent of adults were born while Carson was on the air or prior.
In 2014, YouGov asked Americans to evaluate different late-night talk show hosts, finding that — more than 20 years after he went off the air! — Carson was still most likely to be identified as Americans’ favorite host. Overall, a third of Americans said Carson was their favorite host. Among those age 45 and up, more than half did.
That was 10 years ago, but more recent data is not much different. YouGov’s regular assessments of the popularity of celebrities indicates that Carson is still more popular than Colbert, Fallon and Kimmel. That’s in part because older Americans (members of the baby boom generation or Generation X) view him much more positively than the three current hosts. It’s also because millennials, who are younger, are not much more enthusiastic about the current hosts than they are about Carson.
This is a reflection of the decreased likelihood of younger Americans (and Americans overall) to watch late-night shows. Carson consistently pulled in more than 19 million viewers as his tenure neared its end in 1992. A “Tonight Show” special that aired this year celebrating Fallon’s 10th anniversary as host had about 3 million viewers.
In other words, if you’re going to decry late-night hosts and seize upon someone widely regarded as the best to do it, Carson is who you’d pick. Particularly if you are speaking to a group of Pennsylvanians that skews older than Americans overall.
Of course, Trump had just mentioned a much less-popular talk-show host, someone who is viewed positively by less than half of the number of people who like Carson and even trails Fallon by 20 points. We’re referring, of course, to Greg Gutfeld.
Sometimes when you spin the wheel, you go bust.