Marc Maron Would Have Hosted Trump on ‘WTF’ With Certain Conditions

WTF with Marc Maron is set to end this fall after 16 years of long-form conversations with comedians, actors, politicians, writers and the watermelon-smashing bigot who famously walked out on the podcast. 

But one celebrity who never appeared on the show is Donald Trump, which makes sense considering that Maron is a vocal critic of the president. And when then-candidate Trump was making the podcast rounds in 2024, guesting on The Joe Rogan Experience and This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von, Maron blasted his fellow comic podcasters in a pre-election blog post. 

While he didn’t mention Trump by name, Maron wrote that “when comedians with podcasts have shameless, self-proclaimed white supremacists and fascists on their show to joke around like they are just entertainers or even just politicians, all it does is humanize and normalize fascism.” 

But apparently, Maron wasn’t wholly opposed to having Trump on his show. In the most recent episode of WTF, Maron was joined by past guest and longtime fan Judd Apatow, who walked Maron through an assortment of his favorite clips from the past 16 years. Naturally, they discussed Barack Obama’s headline-making episode from 2015.

“I don’t think I realized how truly present and somewhat vulnerable he was in the conversation,” Maron said upon hearing an excerpt of the interview. 

“I think that it’s nice to hear a president talk about how difficult these decisions are to make, as opposed to a president who will never admit that anything is hard or that he’s ever made a mistake,” Apatow suggested. “There’s such a madness to the fact that our president never says, ‘I screwed that one up.’”

While on the subject of America’s current leader, Apatow asked Maron, “What would you have done if Donald Trump wanted to come on WTF?” And, somewhat surprisingly, Maron revealed that his team discussed this very possibility.

“We had an agreement when he was president before, and now again, on the basis of fair play, if he would come on with the same terms as Obama — which was, we get final cut, they don't get questions and that’s that — then we would do it,” Maron explained. “But, you know, we didn’t pursue it.”

“But we said if they came to us, we would have to do it,” the comedian continued. “But, you know, he would have done that, and it would’ve just been what it is. He’ll just yammer on about whatever.”

As for a potential strategy for interviewing Trump, Maron admitted that it wouldn’t have been too different from his other WTF interviews. “I don’t know If you can get a clear answer from that guy,” he noted. “I don’t know what my approach would be, but generally it’s to get them grounded in how they got there. So it would be interesting to kind of get into his childhood and his development.”

Of course, this approach would arguably run the risk of humanizing and normalizing Trump, which was Maron’s beef with the other podcasters he publicly called out last fall. 

Had this interview actually happened, it probably would have ended with the most nerve-racking “Are we good?” in the show’s history.