Dan Le Batard apologizes for ‘hypocritical’ 4th of July episode with old Donald Trump interviews

Of any host in mainstream sports media, Dan Le Batard may be the one his audience would least expect to pull a stunt like he did for Independence Day last week.

With his show off for the Fourth of July, Le Batard cobbled together a “greatest hits” collection of old interviews with Donald Trump. Producers Chris Cote and Jeremy Tache led the audience through the wandering maze of call-ins from back when America’s most polarizing man was simply a real estate magnate, reality TV host, and frequent radio guest.

What Le Batard likely envisioned as a self-deprecating troll landed like a bomb within the most vocal members of the show’s audience over the weekend.

“This goes down as one of the sh*ttiest things this show has done,” wrote one listener on the show’s subreddit.

Given that Le Batard has made a national name for himself over the past decade by bashing Trump’s anti-immigrant politics, the edit came across as tone-deaf to his passionate audience. Even producer Roy Bellamy bickered with listeners on X over the weekend while distancing himself from the decision to re-air the interviews (which Pablo Torre initially found out about in 2023).

At the tail end of Monday’s episode of The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz, the host responded to the criticism. Le Batard apologized for the “hypocritical” idea and poor execution, which he called “normalizing something … during a truly terrible time in America and around the world.”

“Let me, before we get out of here for the day, make sure to let the audience know that it was heard over the weekend. I was sick to my stomach over the weekend. I was embarrassed over the weekend because we swung and missed on Friday with something we were trying to execute with old Donald Trump interviews that landed very poorly,” he said.

“And so I just simply wanted to apologize to the audience. We screwed up. I screwed up. And anything that has my name on it shouldn’t look that hypocritical or inconsistent. So I am legitimately embarrassed that we tried to do something, and that the way that it ended up landing was to feel like it was normalizing something that during a truly terrible time in America and around the world, that was something that I shouldn’t have been doing and we shouldn’t have been doing. So my apology on this subject is sincere, and I have a great deal of remorse. Like I said, we shouldn’t have done that and I’m sorry that we did.”

Le Batard ran a voter registration drive last November and, for years, ran afoul of ESPN management for locking horns with Trump on-air during his first administration. As recently as last month, Le Batard sounded off on Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement policies, claiming that the administration’s goal was to make the country more white.

But aside from those comments, Le Batard and the show have mostly avoided political talk since last year’s general election. The host has openly stated that he knows his message can go stale and that it turns off the audience.

Perhaps the Fourth of July special episode featuring Trump was the show’s attempt to poke fun at itself, but it clearly fell flat amid an increasingly fraught political environment, a contentious conflict in the Middle East, and ongoing protests against the administration’s nativist policies.