‘There’s No Question!’ Jerry Springer Says His Wild Talk Show Helped Get People Ready to Accept Trump

Pioneering tabloid talk show host Jerry Springer told SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah that his wild show helped get people used to accepting someone like former President Donald Trump.

On Friday’s edition of The Dean Obeidallah Show, the host put Springer on the spot by asking if his seminal show’s reliance on no-holds-barred guests paved the way for the Trump phenomenon. Mr. Springer copped to a share of the blame, saying Trump is “exactly” like those guests, except in one respect:

Dean: Do you see a connection, do you see a line between the success of The Jerry Springer Show–which was everywhere, it defined a decade–and the way people look at TV and what people let people get away with, do you think that on some level…it contributed to people accepting someone like Donald Trump?

Jerry Springer: 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, though, there’s more respect given to the people who were on my show, is they have enough sense not to run for president.

They’re on the show letting their emotions out, their feelings out, they don’t speak the Queen’s English, they don’t have money, they don’t live in palaces they aren’t rich and famous. But they have feelings like everybody else and when they get angry, they probably curse and they yell and sometimes fight ’cause they don’t have the skills to settle things in different ways. That’s Trump, 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 of he knew how to run the world and run the country. When in fact he knows, he knows nothing about how you run a country and we paid the price for that. But yeah of course there’s similarities except for the issue of “Gee, I don’t think I ought to be president.”

Watch the clip above, via SiriusXM.