Former ESPN Host Apologizes for July 4 Show Decision

A longtime radio host with years of national experience is apologizing to his audience after a poorly received programming stunt this week.

"The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz" was off for the Fourth of July last week. The show played a "greatest hits" collection of interviews with Donald Trump from over the years.

The move was an attempt at humor, but it wasn't received well by Le Batard's audience.

"This goes down as one of the [expletive]-est things this show has done," one comment says on the show's subreddit.

“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," Le Batard said during Monday's show.

"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."

Le Batard said that the decision to air the old interviews was "hypocritical or inconsistent" with his former anti-Trump stances. The show has consistently criticized the now-president throughout much of his first term and the lead-up to him becoming the Republican nominee in 2016.

"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 added.

Le Batard has called his previous Trump interviews "foolish."

"I don’t think there’s anything in my life...that has left me feeling more foolish than underestimating what total shamelessness could do to American systems that I thought were stronger than that," he said on the "Pablo Torre Finds Out" podcast back in 2023.

"I would have never guessed that I would be so stupid as to think that from that entity could come the challenging of the principles that we hold dearest allegedly as a country.”

Le Batard's show has been politically charged - a tradition dating back to his time at ESPN where that wasn't always appreciated - but he's toned the message down in recent years, claiming that it wears on the audience.

Last week's programming gamble certainly wasn't well received, and Monday's apology made it clear that Le Batard was very aware of his mistake.