Inside Trump’s War on Late-Night Comedy – and Why It Matters

Tonight, Stephen Colbert’s show will end. Trump’s deeply corrupt and autocratic efforts to harass and censor late-night TV hosts who mock or criticize him... will not.

Donald Trump gives a speech at The Villages, Florida, on May 1, 2026. Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP via Getty Images.

Donald Trump’s lawless and increasingly authoritarian second term has been marked by a vicious and corrupt campaign against the media – with the president extracting major payoffs from the parent companies of ABC and CBS, threatening to pull broadcast licenses or derail corporate mergers after seeing unflattering TV segments, and incessantly demanding the firing of a TV host he hates, after celebrating the cancellation of a different host’s long-running show.

This has been a long time coming, and the seeds of this cartoonishly mad-king presidential conduct were planted during his first term. Trump has been trying to start several of his wars for nearly a decade – not just on Iran, but on two former Comedy Central hosts, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. The difference now is he’s surrounded himself with aggressive personality-cultists who don’t think laws or democratic norms are real, and who want to help Trump cement his cultural resentments and catty fury into federal policy.

Tonight, Colbert’s show will end. The president’s crusade against comics and talk show hosts will continue.

This story is based on interviews with various former and current Trump advisers, TV network sources, professional comedians, and others with intimate knowledge of the American president’s crackdowns on free speech and popular culture. In the course of our reporting, it became even clearer to us than it was before that Trump’s war on late-night TV isn’t a joke or some distraction. A cornerstone of the international autocrats’ playbook is smothering dissent in the media and on the airwaves. And that, perhaps above all, includes satire.