On Thursday, CBS made the surprising and controversial decision to cancel the successful program “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert. On Friday, Donald Trump expressed his joy because in May 2026, one of his main critics will be off the air.
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A few days ago, in his particular and applauded sarcastic style, Colbert criticized Paramount for reaching a $16 million agreement with Trump in exchange for the president dropping a lawsuit against CBS over a Kamala Harris report during the presidential campaign.
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Colbert described the agreement as a “big, fat bribe,” as the goal would be to please the Trump administration to approve the sale of Paramount to Skydance Media.
Political suspicions also point to Skydance CEO David Ellison having a political stance closer to President Trump’s ideology.
Trump’s harsh attack against late-night shows
“I love that Colbert has been fired. He had even less talent than audience,” Trump stated on his TruthSocial platform before asserting that “Jimmy Kimmel, who has even less talent, will be next,” referring to the host of the late-night show on ABC.
But the leader didn’t stop there and praised libertarian politician Greg Gutfeld, who hosts a political satire program for the conservative network Fox News, an ally of the leader: “He’s better than all the others combined, including the idiot from NBC who has ruined the Tonight Show,” directing his latest disqualification against Jimmy Fallon, who completed the trio of the major late-night talk shows in the United States.
Why did CBS take Colbert’s show off the air?
The network only cited “financial pressures” as the argument and announced that the cancellation will take effect in May 2026, including the end of the “The Late Show” franchise that began in 1993 with David Letterman.
The cancellation of Colbert, who started the show in 2015 replacing Letterman, adds to a series of changes reflecting the transformation of television consumption in the United States. The young audience has rapidly migrated to streaming platforms, leaving behind fixed schedules and cable or broadcast television.
According to data from The New York Times, if in 2018 late-night shows garnered an advertising revenue of $439 million, that figure dropped to $220 million in 2024. Therefore, according to some industry sources, the high production costs of late-night programs are becoming increasingly difficult to justify.
However, Colbert’s “Late Show” was the audience leader in the time slot from 11:30 pm to 12:30 am. According to the site LateNighter, in the second quarter of the year, the CBS program had an average audience of 2.4 million viewers per show, with a 1% increase compared to the first three months of 2025.
For this reason, several lawmakers have expressed suspicion about the decision of CBS and Paramount. Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren commented on social media that “CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert criticized CBS’s parent company, Paramount, for its $16 million deal with Trump, a deal that looks like a bribe...America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons”.