CBS Cancels Colbert, Fuels Trump Criticism as Host’s Popularity Surges Beyond Late Night
The most watched weekday late night broadcast show, CBS’ “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” will end next May. While the popular show, with an average nightly viewership of around 2.5 million, will end, the theories why CBS decided to pull the plug are just beginning.
The Hill, a political journalism newspaper and website that focuses on politics, policy, business, and international relations, reported that “Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) blasted CBS for announcing it will cancel comedian and host Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show,’ pressing for more transparency on the decision.”
The move comes shortly after Colbert publicly took CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, to task for settling a $16 million lawsuit with President Trump.
“CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump — a deal that looks like bribery,” Warren wrote Thursday on social platform X. “America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons,” reported The Hill, which is a “must read” for the political community. Sen. Schiff concurred with Sen. Warren’s position.
However, CBS said the decision was “purely a financial one against a challenging backdrop in late night,” although some people said the cancellation was done in order to smooth the way for CBS’s pending multi-billion dollar merger with Skydance Media, which requires federal approval.
Colbert, who has hosted the popular program since 2015, has routinely skewered President Trump, thus giving life to the theory that the decision to cancel the show was part of the settlement with Trump over a dispute of editing an interview on “60 Minutes” with Kamala Harris when she was running for president.
On July 18, USA TODAY reported that President Trump said, “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings,” Trump said in a July 18 Truth Social post, before also ripping ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, another late-night host known to skewer Trump. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert.”
His remarks about the cancellation of “The Late Show” reveal what we already know: Trump is a “sore winner.” But his statement about ratings also reveals something else about his character that is well-known. He lives in a bubble surrounded by sycophants who assure him that any criticism of him is unwarranted and untrue.
Why else would he mention Colbert’s ratings, which are the highest of any program in his time slot, when recent polls show that the president’s ratings among citizens and presidential scholars have been declining since the day he took office?
A 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Survey of 200 presidential scholars conducted by co-directors of the Presidential Greatness Project, University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus and Coastal Carolina University political science professor Justin Vaughn, revealed what everyone but the cult of Trump supporters know – President Trump is the worst president in U.S. history.
Key findings of the poll showed: “Lincoln was rated the greatest president with an average score of 93.9/100, followed by FDR (90.8), Washington (90.3), Theodore Roosevelt (78.6), Thomas Jefferson (77.5), Harry Truman (75.3), Obama (73.8), Dwight Eisenhower (73.7), Lyndon Johnson (72.9) and John F. Kennedy (68.4). Trump was again the lowest-ranked president (10.9) with James Buchanan (16.7), Andrew Johnson (21.6), Franklin Pierce (24.6) and William Henry Harrison (26.1) rounding out the bottom five. FDR (65.4%) was the top choice for which president should be put on Mount Rushmore next, followed by Obama (11%) and Eisenhower, Kennedy and James Madison (4%).”
What probably is particularly maddening to the egocentric, totalitarian-liking, lack-of-empathy president is that President Joe Biden was voted the 14th best president, way ahead of Trump (who however can claim the most lies ever told by a president).
But since Mr. Trump publicly says that any criticism of him is “fake news,” he’ll pretend that the poll is just another example of the lies that unpatriotic Americans, Democrats, socialists, communists and evil people tell about him.
And then he’ll turn on Fox News to hear his version of the truth and, like the evil queen in the fairy tale “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” ask, “Magic Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?”
The cancellation of “The Late Show” will not end the criticism of Mr. Trump. Criticism of the president will now be likened to defenders of the First Amendment fighting to stop a president who is against free speech, making criticism more relevant than before CBS’s surrender to the totalitarian president.
As for Mr. Colbert, he will now become more popular than ever. He’ll have many venues in which to make people laugh and become politically aware.
He will now join Edward Murrow and Walter Cronkite as CBS greats, as CBS will now join the list of “one time greats.”
