“Over the weekend it sunk in that they’re killing off our show,” Stephen Colbert reflected at the top of The Late Show on Monday, following a tempest of outrage over CBS’s suspiciously timed cancellation of the program that had only gained strength over the weekend. “But they made one mistake: They left me alive!” The audience responded with chants of “Stephen! Stephen!”—which, in retrospect, was the first clue that the host’s taunt was not entirely a joke.
Since then, Colbert has been ripping into Donald Trump with renewed relish, often while also flaying CBS and its parent company, Paramount. By doubling down on attacking his most powerful enemy, at a time when network execs are facing such intense scrutiny for what many believe was a politically motivated firing, he isn’t just making the most of the 10 months he has left—he’s essentially daring his bosses to kill the show sooner. (Think an expensive contract would be enough to keep a host judged to be a liability on the air? Kindly recall NBC’s Megyn Kelly debacle of 2018.) If they take the bait, Colbert will have his most damning evidence yet that what they called a “purely financial decision” was, at least in part, political.
For those who don’t keep daily tabs on late-night talk shows—which, let’s be honest, is the vast majority of us these days—it’s worth reviewing this week’s Late Show highlights. On Monday, Colbert devoted his whole monologue to Trump. First he addressed his cancellation (“Cancel culture has gone too far”), expressing relief that “I can finally speak unvarnished truth to power and say what I really think about Donald Trump—starting right now,” then feinting in the direction of understatement: “I don’t care for him. Doesn’t seem to have, like, the skillset to be President. Just not a good fit, you know?” He moved on to reports claiming that his show, despite winning its broadcast time slot, was losing some $40 million a year: “I could see us losing $24 million, but where could Paramount have possibly spent the other 16… oh yeah.” In an instantly viral soundbite, Colbert responded to Trump’s social media posts calling him talentless and gloating over his show’s demise by asking: “Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism?: Go f-ck yourself.” Then he prefaced a riff on the Wall Street Journal’s Epstein birthday letter bombshell with: “The President was buddies with a pedophile.”
“It’s a great day to be me because I am not Donald Trump,” Colbert greeted the audience on Tuesday, before discussing reports that FBI agents were ordered to scour the Epstein files for Trump mentions. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t hide who Dumpty humped with his friend,” he quipped. Also: “It’s not a great look when you fly on the pedophile’s plane enough times to earn diamond pervert status.” In response to Trump’s apparent fixation on arresting Barack Obama, Colbert wondered aloud: “What the f-ck is wrong with this guy?” Finally, he seemed to pivot away from the President with a bit about soaring beef prices. But then he brought Trump into that story as well, suggesting that his tariffs were partly to blame.
Wednesday’s Late Show opened by poking fun at Coca-Cola’s plans to oblige POTUS by manufacturing cane-sugar-sweetened soda in the U.S. with a faux advertisement for cocaine-enhanced “Don Jr. Coke.” A monologue that kicked off with a few jokes about the impending heatwave soon segued to a familiar subject. “One person who’s already sweating is Donald Trump,” Colbert said, before pausing to let the audience boo. To no one’s surprise, the host made a meal out of the news that the Justice Department had, in May, informed the President that his name was in the Epstein files. “He’s in the file! He’s in the file!” Colbert chanted, rubbing his hands together and approaching the camera with a gleeful grin. “You know how they say there’s no such thing as bad publicity? They’re not talkin’ about this.” He went on to show a greatest-hits collection of Trump-Epstein photos, casually drop “Micropenis DJT” into a list of fictional Trump nicknames, and roast Trump for the mathematical impossibility of his promised prescription-drug-price reductions. And then he circled back to “how [Trump is] making my network crawl,” citing the President’s claim that he would secure another $20 million in free airtime from CBS. “By bending the knee, they lost like $40 million this year,” Colbert said. “They better watch out. They might get canceled for purely financial reasons.”
Colbert ended his show’s four-day week, on Thursday, with more than eight minutes on the Epstein saga. First there was a cold open skit that used a montage of Three Stooges eye-poking clips to mock Attorney General Pam Bondi for citing a torn cornea as her reason for missing an awkwardly timed speaking engagement at a summit on sex trafficking. In his monologue, Colbert tore through the latest Trump-Epstein headlines (“What are you gonna tell me next—that the Pope is in the Catholic files? That a bear is on the cover of this month’s Modern Woods Pooper?”), from Epstein’s evasiveness on Trump in a 2010 deposition to Mark Epstein’s claim that his brother dumped Trump after deciding he was “a crook” to the Ghislaine Maxwell of it all. When he finally moved off the topic, it was for a bit lampooning the President’s recent statements on artificial intelligence that mostly seemed to be an excuse to direct viewers to Wednesday’s already-notorious season premiere of South Park (also a Paramount property), which included an extremely NSFW parody PSA starring an uncanny, AI-generated Trump. I’d call this a mic drop, but I have a feeling Colbert will have plenty more to say come Monday.
When you consider how litigious Trump has been with regard to practices that legal precedent supports as protected speech—of which satire and commentary are two—Colbert’s stand is a risky one. But whether you think his response to The Late Show’s cancellation is brave or foolish, you can’t deny that he’s playing his cards perfectly against Paramount and CBS. If the powers that be pull him off the air before May 2026, he’ll have all but proven that their decision to dump him was about more than the cost of making his show. And if they resign themselves to letting him say whatever he wants for the next 10 months? Well then, he’ll get to say whatever he wants for the next 10 months. I can’t imagine either option making his bosses jump for joy.
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