Late Night Sends a Defiant Message to Trump—and CBS

In scenes reminiscent of The Magnificent Seven—riding to the aid of a beleaguered victim under siege from a bullying warlord—another kind of posse rode into late night Monday night. This group, a coalition of committed defenders of fair play and the freedom of funny speech, declared they would take a stand against the orange caudillo.

You might call them The Magnificent Nine or Ten (I lost count somewhere along the way), as they made their defiance known on their own shows and inside Stephen Colbert’s stronghold on Broadway.

Perhaps CBS and its Paramount owners assumed that by Monday night, the blowback from their decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert would have been drowned out by whatever distraction the President could stir up to smother the latest Jeffrey Epstein news.

As David Letterman, another famous Late Show host, was fond of saying: no dice.

Not only did Colbert make clear his opinion of the network’s claim that his coming ouster was purely financial—he mocked it, noting in his monologue that perhaps some of the alleged $40 million in losses came from the $16 million CBS paid to bribe Trump to drop his 60 Minutes lawsuit—but he also assembled an impressive posse to back him up at the Ed Sullivan Theater.

The headline performance of the night came as Weird Al Yankovic and Lin-Manuel Miranda performed a version of “Viva la Vida” while the now-famous “Coldplay Cam”—which recently inadvertantly captured a philandering CEO and his head of HR—panned the audience, revealing everyone from Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers to John Oliver and Jon Stewart, from Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen to Adam Sandler, Christopher McDonald, and Robert Smigel.

Colbert spoke—amusingly—of his own defiance: “It sunk in that they’re killing off our show. But they made one mistake: They left me alive.”

He had a more pointed message for the President, who last Friday posted gleefully about the cancellation and cited Colbert’s “lack of talent”: “How dare you, sir? Could an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism? Go f*ck yourself.”

Colbert declined to let Jimmy Kimmel share in the martyrdom. “No, I am the martyr. There’s only room for one on this cross.”

Somehow, Miranda and Yankovic’s song also got canceled for “purely financial reasons,” Colbert joked, telling them it lost $40–$50 million. They were baffled, since it had been a Number One hit—just like The Late Show was Number One in the ratings.

Jimmy Fallon opened his Tonight Show monologue with a salute to Colbert: “Stephen has done years of incredibly smart and hilarious television, and he’s won 10 Emmys. Trump heard and he was like, ‘Big deal, last week I won a FIFA World Cup trophy.’”

But the full blast of Colbert defense and defiance came from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, where he delivered a monologue that opened with a brutal (and hilarious) takedown of the latest developments in the Epstein saga, before transitioning into sermon mode.

Stewart went all in defending Colbert—his longtime friend and the star whose career he helped launch on The Daily Show. He reminisced about their rise in the small pond of basic cable, and the turning point in 2015 when Colbert chose to “challenge himself” by succeeding David Letterman on CBS, while Stewart quit and fled to a small farm upstate.

He acknowledged that late-night TV is a financially struggling format, vividly likening it to “basically operating a Blockbuster kiosk inside a Tower Records.”

But, he emphasized, Colbert has the Number One show.

Was the cancellation truly “purely financial”? Or, Stewart asked—pointedly—of Paramount (his own corporate parent), “Maybe the path of least resistance for your $8 billion merger?”

He accused his corporate masters of killing a show that they knew rankled a fragile and vengeful President, so insecure he was suffering terribly from a case of chronic penis insufficiency.

And he reminded viewers that CBS had already lost the benefit of the doubt when it “sold out” its flagship news show, 60 Minutes, to pay an “extortion fee” to said President.

From there, Stewart launched into an especially lurid (and hilarious) description of the absurdity of Trump suing Rupert Murdoch—owner of Fox News—for last week’s Wall Street Journal piece about his Epstein birthday card. The move, Stewart said, was like filing a lawsuit during one of the metaphorical sexual favors Fox had long been performing on Trump—though he was, let’s say, far more specific.

The real reason for The Late Show’s cancellation, Stewart concluded, lies in “the fear and pre-compliance gripping all of America’s institutions—institutions that have chosen not to fight.”

And then, in a moment that may echo through the halls of CBS, Stewart—who had until now said nothing about his own future—declared: “This is not the moment to give in. I’m not giving in. I’m not going anywhere—I think.”

The chef’s kiss? Stewart’s finale—a reprise from earlier in his Daily Show career—a full gospel-choir-backed musical number directed at those capitulating institutions. His message—delivered in preacher style and righteous song—echoed Colbert’s earlier one to the President: “Go f*ck yourself!”

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