Who's Afraid of Stephen Colbert?
Dearest Reader,
For a week straight the U.S. has been reeling from the sudden cancellation of late night television’s most popular and influential program The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS television network. Indeed, the 10 year-run of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, preceded by the 22 year tenure of The Late Show with David Letterman, will be shut down entirely come May 2026. The program’s charismatic, political and very funny host Stephen Colbert was visibly stunned by the news when he announced it on air July 17th. He was only informed the day prior. I immediately understood, when this shock hit the public, that I would be writing about it this week. I would likely have published this earlier, but I felt like some backstory was missing to make sense of this bizarre decision and something illuminating might emerge—and it did. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell exclusive entitled “Justice Department Told Trump in May That His Name Is Among Many in the Epstein Files.” This deeply inconvenient truth betrays the incredibly compromised position the president finds himself in and a potential major factor behind how Colbert finds himself on the outs with CBS.
Donald Trump is alleged to be a longtime associate of the late alleged sex trafficker and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. There are numerous stories and photographs floating around the internet illustrating the intimacy of their apparent friendship. As you probably know, Jeffrey Epstein was an infamous New York City based financier, awaiting trial for sex trafficking underage girls and women, when he was mysteriously found dead by apparent suicide in his Manahttan jail cell in 2019. Donald Trump was president at the time and Epstein’s death quickly became a virulent conspiracy theory that fit neatly into other Trump 1.0 (first term) and covid-era right wing conspiracies like “Pizzagate” and “Qanon.”
Popular right wing conspiracies are often centered around child abuse or pedophilia which is a effective vehicle of popular disgust and outrage to welcome countless people to the MAGA cult. I use the term cult quite specifically because Donald Trump is arguably a cult figure born out of his celebrity, perceived wealth, bombast and the evangelical Christian movement within the GOP that has exalted him to god-like status. Remember when there was a frightening attempt on Trump's life in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024 that killed one bystander while he narrowly escaped? At the Republican National Convention on July 17th, MAGA followers arrived at the venue wearing faux bandages on their ears to express solidarity within the cult and fealty to then presidential candidate Trump who had a bandage on his ear from the attempt on his life—his survival was perceived as miraculous. That’s textbook cult behavior.
So Trump is their "retribution" as he says—the man who will “drain the swamp” of Washington, D.C. politics and root out all the sexual deviants targeting children. MAGA started getting uneasy however, once FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi started a press tour claiming Epstein unequivocally died by suicide and no new evidence would be revealed in the case, dismissing what has become known as the “Epstein Files,” a trove of evidence secured from his properties before his death. Kind of like the liberal thirst for the Mueller Report to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign that effectively fell short; The Epstein Files have become this great white whale for the GOP base in their hunger to unearth an alleged cabal of liberal pedofiles running D.C. politics. So when MAGA was suddenly told that the “conspiracy” was over and no further evidence would be released—they kind of flipped their lid. They are conspiratorial thinkers by training so for this administration to perceive they would let it go so easily was naive.
Furthermore, like a true kakistocracy—“government [run] by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state”—this administration lacks the competence to wrangle this problem, but they only really have this problem because of their corrupt incompetence after leveraging it’s popularity for months, if not years. It’s a mess. The GOP base is slowly integrating the dissonance of what if Trump is one of them? This is where MAGA finds itself and a lot of people are in the midst of a moral tailspin. Some are also trying to rationalize why they voted for a president who has done little to help the working class so far, but seems to be enriching himself and his cronies. They overlooked his greed for the most part, but this Epstein debacle is hard to square.
Returning to the star of this newsletter, Stephen Colbert, what does he have to do with any of this? Well, it seems that the week of his firing, Colbert did a monologue where he called out “a big fat bride” from Trump to CBS’s parent company Paramount Global who were in the midst of a challenging merger with Skydance Media who forked over $8 billion—it just went through today (faster than expected). We all know the president likes to call journalism “fake news” and loathes negative press. In fact, he’s truly a marketing savant whether one likes it or not. I mean who can steal a debate they're arguably losing by exclaiming “Their eating the dogs, their eating the cats!” referring to a baseless, racist claim about Haitian immigrants in Ohio. By making that bizarre intervention as Vice President Harris was mopping the floor with him in the September 2024 debate they shared, instead of headlines reading something like “Harris destroys Trump in debate,” the headlines were often about that outrageous anti-immigrant statement. Diabolical, but effective.
So the merger between Paramount and Skydance presents a unique opportunity to the president to effectively capture a major network that houses CBS News (which is 97 years old) and the legendary 60 Minutes (which is 56 years old). In November 2024 Trump sued CBS for a 60 Minutes interview about Vice President Harris that he didn’t like and the network settled without fighting a rather bogus or at least contestable claim for a whopping $16 million. Prior to CBS settling, ABC settled a similarly weak defamation lawsuit with Trump for $15 million. It is widely understood that corporations seemed to voluntarily subjugate themselves to the president and his administration even before he took office.
Since inauguration, it’s been happening across the board with big law firms, tech companies and colleges/universities. In fact this week, Columbia University just settled to pay $220 million to the administration to resolve various allegations of impropriety as the test case of academic supplication. Basically anyone with a board of directors or shareholders is folding like a napkin in the face of this administration. Individual entertainers have been a bit harder to wrangle and there are still some in the news media who are holding the line—I consider Colbert in this irascible camp.
Therefore, it's possible that when Colbert boldly jokes about the Paramount/Skydance merger as the reason for paying $16 million as a “big fat bribe” to the president to ensure their merger goes through, that may have been flagged. National Amusements, the parent company to Paramount Global who are above CBS in the org chart, likely saw Colbert as a spoiler for the merger. And with National Amusements and Paramount over a barrel, Trump may have suggested he wanted the late night host, who has skewered him for a decade, to be fired and the program scrapped.
The network claimed it was a “purely financial decision” which has some merit since late night in an aging, perhaps dying artform in our short-term, polarizing, click-bait, increasingly uncurated world of mostly steaming programming. Some reports claim The Late Show has a $40 million budget shortfall annually--that figure hasn’t been affirmed definitively. But it’s bizarre to cancel a show that is the number one rated network TV late night franchise, has a thirty-year legacy and has already come out of the “Upfronts” in May 2025, where networks announce the slate of network programming for the next year. Even the Writer’s Guild of America is calling for an investigation. Also, if the budget is lacking, a logical option is to make budgetary cuts to save money. The Seth Meyers Show cut its band to save money and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon tightened their belt by downshifting from five to four nights a week. But to fire your most popular host and eliminate the entire franchise? That seems excessive.
There are even rumblings that Skydance Media may acquire self-proclaimed “anti-woke” right-wing conservative Bari Weiss’ Free Press signaling a shift in CBS News and 60 Minutes programming. Skydance is founded by CEO David Ellison and his father Larry Ellison is a longtime associate of the president, as well as the CTO behind multi-national tech company Oracle who, according to their website, provide a “complete suite of integrated cloud applications and a cloud infrastructure platform.” You may recall reporting from 2024 where during an Oracle financial analysts meeting, Larry Ellison praised an emergent AI surveillance state saying:
“We’re going to have supervision. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
Therefore, I believe CBS may be on track to be a bastion of right-leaning to propagandistic State TV level programming sooner than we might expect.
Circling back once again—Colbert is being canceled, it seems, to secure a profitable merger, placate the whims of incoming right-leaning corporate overlords, provide one less space (in the long term, after May 2026) for political dissent and as a distraction for the Epstein drama that kicked off in early July. It’s quite a statement to cancel The Late Show and is a tacit threat to all late night programming or anyone with a microphone, really. Sadly, Colbert is not alone when it comes to being threatened or suppressed. Nevertheless, In recent weeks as the Epstein furor mounts its clear Trump needs public relations distractions akin to his racist comments about Haitians last year—red meat for MAGA and liberals alike to wrestle with and finally shut the f*ck up about Epstein.
In the past week and a half the president or his administration has threatened former President Obama with spurious charges of treason, released compromising and formerly restricted FBI record on Martin Luther King, Jr. against his family’s wishes, made an offer to secure Epstein grand jury transcripts (which was struck down in court this week signalling a long journey to disclosure and would unlikely directly implicate the president), continued to attack famed former CECOT prisoner and Maryland resident Kilmar Abrega-Garcia, continued to promote Florida detention center “Alligator Alcatraz” as a blueprint for rapidly expanding ICE prisons, threatened to groundlessly revoke comedian Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship, continued to call for the same unjust revocation for NYC Democratic Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s citizenship, shared repurposed claims against Hilary Clinton and her emails as AG Bondi opens a new probe, signed an executive order banning “Woke AI” (Like, what? Basically he’s deregulating AI) widening the net for public manipulation, threatened The View and co-host Joy Behar after she said she thinks Trump is jealous of former President Obama, alluding to future plans to bomb Iran (legally in the grey, again) and withdrew federal funding from public broadcasting assuring the closure of many local NPR and PBS stations across the country. Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.
All aforementioned are certainly noteworthy. However, the loss of funding for NPR and PBS, the firing of Colbert and threats to other outspoken figures who inform the public are major highlights as Trump navigates this Epstein firestorm. As I said last week in my newsletter on the Supreme Court and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson:
“And given the voluminous backlash over quashing the federal investigation of the Epstein files, a stockpile of evidence on deceased sexual predator and shady financier Jeffrey Epstein, I suspect the longer it persists the more dangerous this administration will become.”
Oh and Trump is currently suing The Wall Street Journal for a cartoonish $10 billion for letting the Epstein cat out of the bag.
Stephen Colbert still has 10 months or so on The Late Show and I look forward to what his creative genius and smart crew will produce now that he’s unleashed. There is also speculation that famed comedian Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show may be on the chopping block, since the cable network Comedy Central is under the Paramount umbrella. We will see where all this is headed, but safe to say tensions are running high. But don’t despair, the other side of bullying a beloved figure is it awakens the conscience of many and rallies people together…so stay close and away we go!
With Love During End Times,
Agunda