US chatshow host Stephen Colbert – axed last week despite his ratings outstripping his late-night rivals’ – is the latest collateral damage from Donald Trump’s reign of grift and revenge.
The presenter of CBS’s The Late Show was told on July 17 that the programme
would be ending in May 2026 purely for “financial reasons”. The network insists it is entirely coincidental that three days earlier, Colbert had described on-air its parent company Paramount’s decision to pay Trump a $16 million (£12m) settlement over a baseless libel claim as “a big fat bribe”.
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Colbert is thought to be in discussions about fronting a new podcast for a less supplicant company, on which he can continue his attacks on Trump. The president wrote on Truth Social network after the decision: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings.”
Meanwhile Paramount chair Shari Redstone will – again, entirely coincidentally – no doubt find it easier to complete the company’s sale to Skydance Media, owned by Trump ally David Ellison. Redstone has been desperately trying to push through the sale but the White House was reluctant to grant it federal approval. Now $16m and the humiliation of one of Trump’s most popular critics may change that.
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