The Trump administration’s 2025 assault on late-night seemed unprecedented.
The President’s irate social media posts denouncing talk-show comedians were nothing new. But then CBS announced it would not renew the contract of frequent Trump critic Stephen Colbert, a move seen by many as an attempt to secure the FCC’s approval for a merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media.
In a letter to the FCC, Sen. Adam Schiff argued that the agency had “become a vehicle for President Trump to exact personal retribution.”
Two months later, FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened ABC and its affiliates after right-wing media outlets seized on an on-air comment that Jimmy Kimmel made in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. The network responded by suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live!, an action the President applauded on Truth Social. “Great News for America,” he wrote. “The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED.”
(For a few days anyway.)
No one in late-night was safe, as the President also called for the dismissals of “NO TALENT” Jimmy Fallon and Seth “fire him IMMEDIATELY” Meyers.
But Trump isn’t the first sitting president to set his sights on his perceived late-night enemies. During the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, Richard Nixon took aim at ABC’s then late-night host, Dick Cavett—and there are secret tapes to prove it.
Picking a fight wasn’t what Cavett had in mind. “I set out to do an entertaining talk show,” he remembered years later. “I never dreamed I would get up to my neck in a national scandal.”
But unlike Johnny Carson, who interviewed Ricardo Montalban while Cavett broadcast an episode with members of the Senate Watergate Committee from their hearing room, Cavett was comfortable getting political. Sometimes, like when he stated that John Lennon should not be deported, that got him noticed by the wrong people.
“There’s a tape somewhere where (H.R.) Haldeman says, ‘You know, this Lennon, he could sway an election,’” Cavett told Big Think. “And that was enough for Tricky Dick to hear.”
Cavett’s late-night show welcomed rabble-rousers like Jane Fonda and Abbie Hoffman, and earned Nixon’s ire by holding a debate about the Vietnam War between young John Kerry and war veteran John E. O’Neill.
Cavett also interviewed “all the villains” in the Watergate scandal, including Attorney General John Mitchell, Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, and the charismatic G. Gordon Liddy.
“I was an addict,” Cavett told TV Guide in 2014. “You couldn’t wait to get your Watergate fix for the day, especially when it became clear that Nixon was lying.”
Cavett’s focus on the Nixon administration’s failings earned the late-night host 26 mentions in the President’s infamous Oval Office audio recordings. “By God, I was on his mind all the time, it seems,” Cavett told Parade. “And the strangest part is that my tape expert friend pointed out that, ‘He mentions you repeatedly, then he also asked for the full tapes of about 25 or 30 shows.’”
Years after the fact, Cavett got to hear a taped conversation between Nixon, chief of staff Haldeman, and special counsel Charles Colson. In it, the president questions the host’s politics—“Is he just a left-winger?”—then quickly escalates: “Is there any way we can screw him? … There must be ways.”
There were ways. According to Cavett, it wasn’t a coincidence that most members of his TV staff, despite their modest salaries, were audited by the Internal Revenue Service.
“Using the IRS was one of Nixon’s hobbies, as we now know,” Cavett noted.
He wasn’t fired from his ABC late-night show, but Cavett was demoted from airing nightly to just one week per month.
ABC didn’t need much White House pressure to make the move. Cavett trailed Carson in the ratings, partly because some affiliates did not carry the show.
The parallels to today are not exact. Nixon operated largely behind closed doors, while Trump’s criticisms play out in public, often in real time. But the underlying dynamic—a president bristling at late-night criticism and exploring ways to push back—has a longer history than it may appear.
“It’s a strange feeling to see the most powerful man in the world, not yet a criminal one, denouncing you,” Cavett remembered. “It’s kind of a creepy feeling.”
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