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Settle In with PBS News
Dave Chapelle on Trump and other top moments from Settle In
00:20:59
Settle In is going on a brief summer break. We're gearing up to return later this summer with more of the candid interviews you've come to enjoy. Until then, here are five of our favorite moments from Settle In so far with Dave Chappelle, Tressie McM...
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- [00:00]
Jeff Bennett
Everybody, Jeff Bennett here. We wanted to let you know that Settle in is taking a brief summer break, but we plan to be back with new episodes very soon. In the meantime, we'll be reposting our full conversations wherever you get your podcasts, so subscribe today. And as a bonus, here's five of our favorite moments from Settle in so far.
- [00:24]
Interviewer
You also did Saturday Night Live's first show in 2025 after President Trump was reelected to office. And I remember in that monologue, you spoke directly to the president and you said, donald Trump. I know you watched the show.
- [00:38]
Comedian
That's right.
- [00:39]
Interviewer
And you said. I mean this when I say this. You said, good luck. Please do better next time.
- [00:46]
Comedian
I admit. Yeah, I admit that.
- [00:48]
Interviewer
How do you think he's doing?
- [00:51]
Comedian
He's joking, right, Man, Come on, man. Nobody wants to feel this way. I don't think anybody wanted a war. They definitely didn't want to arguably lose one.
- [01:08]
Interviewer
But when you're asking him to please do better, what was it in that moment that you were asking the president to do and to do differently?
- [01:16]
Comedian
Well, I believe in that same monologue, I reminded him that everyone on earth is counting on him. I think I made the point that the presidency is no place for a petty person. So, personally, I would say that anyone in any type of leadership position, or even like, a nightclub comedian like me, we have to suffer slights and injuries, and we have to kind of just let some things go, and we have to focus on what's actually important and not cultivate a broth of confusion, which I believe is. I believe he's doing that, you know, for political expediency or whatever reason. I don't understand his methodology, but I just know that Americans, I think everyone wants to have some semblance of peace, and they get their different ways. Some people think there's different things threatening their peace, you know, but being a president seems like an opportunity to be a very unifying force, and I feel like perhaps he squandered that opportunity to put it lightly.
- [02:30]
Interviewer
You also said, I'm tired of being controversial. And that's a word a lot of people have used to describe you. Right. Some of your jokes, some of your remarks in the past, more recently about transgender people, for example. Do you feel like it's fair to call you controversial? Do you consider yourself controversial?
- [02:52]
Comedian
Yeah, that's a hard thing to talk about, because it's a larger question of is it actually controversial? You know, the mechanics of being a nightclub comic have been the same all my life, no matter how famous I've gotten or not. It's just that job is the job. And it is a weird phenomenon the more successful you get. They would start to vet jokes as if I were doing something other than being a nightclub comic. Like all of a sudden I had to consider everybody. But I don't believe that I did. I was considering people that went to nightclubs and paid the COVID charge and were standing in front of me. Now, when you start your career and you go on stage, usually nobody knows who you are when you go on stage. They don't know if you're funny or not. And you literally have to win the crowd over. But then as you get more successful, they kind of know what to expect, which is why you're successful. Then they buy the ticket just to see you, and you have to live up to whatever their hopes are of what the evening is like. But what happened, I think, was that a lot of people who weren't actually invested in what I was doing had things to say about what I was doing. Or some journalists would come and would listen to shows and take jokes out of context and print them wrong just to get rage bait. Because clicking became media and people didn't buy newspapers anymore. The ethics got looser and the headlines didn't really match the stories anymore. It was just what can get people to engage. So I think the country got on a whole algorithm of negativity.
- [04:49]
Jeff Bennett
How much of our political dysfunction is actually an attention problem and how much has the, the media economy reshaped? What kinds of stories and people get rewarded?
- [05:03]
Political Analyst
Yeah, I think there is something to the fact that obviously our attention has been monetized in a way that is really antithetical to how like human curiosity has worked for millennia. But I do think we overstate that fact because it kind of sounds like when you start talking about, you know, so many things are competing for our attention and so we just can't capture people long enough to tell them what matters. Right. And to move them politically. I think there's a bit of a cop out. Right. It is true that it is hard to compete with TikTok and it is difficult to compete with memes. And it is absolutely true that the media ecosystem now rewards the production of cheap, emotion driven content over meaningful information and news. But it is also the case that that is not naturally occurring. That too was a political choice. It is a political choice not to regulate technology companies. It was a political choice. I would point out that both the Democrats and the Republicans have had an opportunity to do and have failed to do so. No one has shown a political appetite, real strong political appetite for regulating technology companies. Because at the root of that is what I would argue is the real problem, which is extre wealth inequality and the extent to which money has infiltrated our systems of governance and certainly campaign financing. And so we have been willing to cede our attention in the name of money, but that was a political choice. And now we find ourselves reckoning with the fact that attention cannot be captured long enough to tell people the truth, the objective truth, about what is happening to them. But that is, again, a lesson about what happens when one side has more power than the other. I don't think that is a foregone conclusion. However, it is absolutely a political choice to say that our media ecosystem needs to have a civic core to it. Right. It is not a foregone conclusion that we all need to just accept artificial intelligence is here and we need to turn over our privacy and our citizenship rights to it. Those are choices. Right. And I think that when we focus too much on whether or not people spend too much time on TikTok, it lets a lot of political actors off the hook.
- [07:29]
Jeff Bennett
Amid this sense of exhaustion, what does renewal look like when it's not that people are apathetic, it's just that people are tired, they're worn out?
- [07:39]
Political Analyst
Yeah, there is a lot of exhaustion. I would argue, though, that much in the way that we sort of have misconstrued the idea of taking care of ourselves and taking care of each other as, you know, self care, you know, solve your problems with a bubble bath, we kind of have that problem writ large with politics. Right. That if you are exhausted and overwhelmed by the onslaught of negative news, that you sort of need to retreat. Right. And you need to withdraw. When in fact, everything from research to history to art will tell you is the exact opposite. That sometimes we aren't exhausted because we are aware of too much, we are exhausted because we are doing too little. The antidote, I think, to political exhaustion, the type that we are talking about, is that we are getting so much passive information and we have so few opportunities to act. We are tired then, not from doing too much, but from doing too little.
- [08:42]
Historian
There's a difference between optimism and hope, right? Hope is the opposite of fear. I am still full of hope that we can construct a present and a future commensurate with the aspirations of the Declaration of Independence and the country that abolished slavery and preserved the Union and extended suffrage and did away with Jim Crow, but the same country that did away with Jim Crow Created Jim Crow. Right. The same country that extended suffrage, denied suffrage, the same country that abolished slavery, protected slavery. So it's never fully light versus dark. I thought after Charlottesville, after both the tone and the chaos of the first Trump term, I thought the country would say, you know what? We wanted to send a message to the establishment. The world as it's taken shape since, really, since the mid-1960s, has not been commensurate with our cares and concerns. So get it together. I thought that message had been sent and that people having sent it, would realize that the messenger was now actually causing more harm than good. And in 2020, that was proven right. So in 2020, I thought, okay, my argument was correct. You know, President Biden's been elected. There's a certain return of gravity. And I mean that both in the physical sense, but also in the metaphorical sense. We were serious again, as ever, history confounds us. Human nature confounds us. Because in the midst of that return of gravity was the introduction to shift metaphors of a particularly devastating virus into the body politic, which is the denial of full, free and fair elections, if you don't like the result. And so the undermining of trust in the ways in which the will of the people is expressed was something I didn't foresee. And the durability of that lie and what it enabled the president, former president and current president to do, which was to keep that 30, 35% of the country that would follow him anywhere, he kept them fully engaged, and then the other 14.9% or so for various circumstances, including mistakes made by the Democratic Party and mistakes made by the then incumbent president, let's be honest, managed to create again, a dispositive number of folks who wanted to send a message again. And so, in that sense, was I surprised? Yes, I was. The argument in the Soul of America and the argument of this current book, is not that there's ever a final victory. It's that there can be provisional hours of hope of constructive public action, of a moral application of our conviction that the Declaration of Independence should, in fact, continue to be our North Star.
- [12:38]
Jeff Bennett
There's so much reverence around America's founding story. And your take on Jamestown stands out because it was so irreverent and biting. And you portray the English settlers not as these heroic figures, but as these sort of bumbling founders. Tell me more about that.
- [12:56]
Author
Yeah, well, first of all, like, of the 109 people who came here, there were nine survivors. They cannibalized each other, they starved to death because they ate all their provisions. They didn't know how to plant. They thought they could, like, climb in the tree and see the Pacific Ocean. They thought there would be diamonds in the rivers. Remember, these were investors. People came here to make money. They weren't like adventurers. They weren't people who explored other nations. And they perished because of their incompetence. And that reframing objectively, right, instead of a mythology of these rugged individualists who came here looking for freedom, we know that that's not what they came here for. And to tell that truth, not just through the eyes of black people, but through an objective lens is important.
- [13:50]
Jeff Bennett
And then there's what transpired in 1619, which gets a lot of attention now because of the book. But you look at this not as a symbolic moment, but as a structural one. The point at which the American colonies became viable because of slave labor.
- [14:09]
Author
And even the term slave labor insinuates that it was like the muscles and the brawn and the, you know, the hard work of those enslaved people. But it is important to understand the intellectual capacities of these people. The intellectual know how the skills that they brought to this country really kind of made America a viable proposition for the investors. And in Europe, right, they didn't have an edible cash crop until the enslaved people in South Carolina start growing rice. And that rice growing culture through language, through the ability to eat, and through the average life expectancy that created this country. And not this idea of like white people came here and worked hard and made this country what it was.
- [15:05]
Jeff Bennett
How do you help people understand that racial hierarchy wasn't accidental, wasn't unintentional, but that it was actually engineered?
- [15:18]
Author
We go through in the book, right, the invention of whiteness. Remember, there wasn't this pan European ethic that gave English people the credit for what Greek people did, and the French people credit for what the Romans did until it was created in the Enlightenment era and how it was refined in large part by Jefferson to create this racial hierarchy that still kind of dominates America. And the reason it is important to understand in American history specifically is because when you talk about slavery and all those other countries and what it meant to America, we were a brand new country and it was enshrined in our Constitution. So when we talk about slavery, slavery has existed in every culture on earth. But a constitutionally enshrined form of human trafficking that reduces human beings to chattel is unique to America, and it is at the foundation of this country.
- [16:28]
Actor
I was looking around at my friends, lives who were still maybe having the chance to figure things out in a more private way, to have more spontaneous experiences, to travel, to sort of live a more quintessentially 20 something life. And I was recreating a 20 something life on screen, but I was basically never not at work.
- [16:53]
Interviewer
You're also not getting to live your 20s and make the mistakes of your 20s that all of us make in the privacy of your own life. Right. It's a very public experience and a highly scrutinized experience. And all of this, we should remind people it's all unfolding at a time when blogging is taking off and social media is taking off and everyone on the Internet has a hot take and an opinion that they ran. Really want to share in that moment. And you were the brunt. You bore the brunt of a lot of that. Right. A lot of it was focused at you in a really intensely, a lot of times unkind, personal way. I wonder how you dealt with that at the time, how you navigated that on top of managing the responsibility of a successful show and running a team and trying to be creative in the moment.
- [17:41]
Actor
Well, I think firstly, I'm going to hook onto two things you said. One is, I think, talking about the fact that this was the rise of blogging. I mean, I've said, I remember, like, joining Twitter the year that girls started. I remember, like posting my first Instagram photo. This was sort of the wild, wild west. And now we're sort of. We've become used to, you know, I don't know if the Grammys happen. And then everybody gets on with like 57 opinions about Sabrina Carpenter's shorts. And we are used to that cycle, but it was new and, and people were trying to figure out what it was and what it meant. And we happened to be in New York at a moment when New York media was really the center of that. And we were sort of adjacent to the people who were writing, but just far enough away that they could be pretty hypercritical, but just close enough that it could sort of feel a little like eating your own. And it was. Looking back, it's a kind of a fascinating cultural moment. It's a fascinating study in. In so much about creativity, human behavior, you know, how we adapt to new technologies. I wouldn't say in the moment it felt like an incredible cultural study. In the moment, it felt like I was just fighting to survive, truly. And. And in terms of how I dealt with it, I loved what you said about holding onto your creativity. That was always the most important thing to me, which is what do I have to do to be able to continue to do this thing that got me here, which is right, and direct and make this work? And I think in terms of how I dealt with it is that I didn't deal with it. And. And that was part of what was so. I think, I think unmanaged trauma, unhandled stress, we know, is, you know, a deep sort of. It's like pouring an accelerant on. On illness. And so these things that I had always dealt with, I'd always sort of been like a sickly kid or someone who, you know, had my. Who had my rough moments. But suddenly that was neck and neck with the rest of my life as the most kind of the loudest theme.
- [19:54]
Interviewer
I wonder what all of that means for your relationship with social media today. How would you describe that?
- [20:00]
Actor
How would I describe my relationship with social media? I'm really lucky because I have some people, you know, I have a production company and the young folks who work for me are very online, so they let me know if there's things that I have to know about or things that are special or amusing or really good memes, scandalous tiktoks that one must see. At the same time, I really treat it more like a part of my job. I have a social media manager, I have a creative director, and those are people that I sort of engage with in terms of what is an interesting and new way for us to use social media. But I'm not actually on the apps, dealing every day with people's perceptions, which I recognize was like a pretty unhealthy cycle for me. And I'd. And I'd argue a pretty unhealthy cycle for anyone.