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Stephen Colbert Could Never Save Us From Trump

Guest Essay

July 18, 2025

By Molly Jong-Fast

Ms. Jong-Fast is the host of the “Fast Politics” podcast and the author of “How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir.”

This week, Stephen Colbert announced that CBS is canceling his late-night show, days after he spoke out against the network’s owner for settling a lawsuit with President Trump for $16 million — a lawsuit it would probably have won. The Colbert news was yet another dark moment for an American media company seemingly bowing and scraping to Mr. Trump, obeying in advance, hoping to make a deal. (For its part, CBS released a statement saying that the cancellation was “purely a financial decision.”)

Barry Diller explained the willingness to settle to Maureen Dowd as needing to “bend the knee if there’s a guillotine at your head.” Of course, the “guillotine” was maybe not being able to do the corporate deal you wanted — Paramount, CBS’s parent company, is in the midst of closing a merger with Skydance that requires approval from the Trump administration — which is not the same as having your head cut off. But maybe to a billionaire, not getting your money is the same as being decapitated. This is not the first time Paramount and its chairwoman, Shari Redstone, have been accused of going along to get along. A “60 Minutes” correspondent, Scott Pelley, noted the company’s desire “to supervise our content in new ways” as the reason for the resignation of Bill Owens, the show’s executive producer.

Stephen Colbert went to CBS in a more innocent era, in 2015, before Donald Trump won the presidency the first time. He’d gotten the gig, to replace the not particularly political ironist David Letterman, after spending nine years doing “The Colbert Report,” a show in which he parodied a Fox News host — playing a character largely based on Bill O’Reilly, with all of his huffy bluster. In taking the bigger stage at the Ed Sullivan Theater, Colbert toned his politics down at first, but it wasn’t until he became a full-throated critic of the new administration that he found his footing. People liked his mostly gentle truth-telling, night after night. They still do; his is the No. 1 show on an admittedly contracting late-night schedule.

Viewers still want political content, but they are not provided with it as they were in Mr. Trump’s first term. #Resistance was good business. The “Trump bump” was real, shoring up legacy newspapers and cable news, and seeding an entire universe of progressive news sites and influencers. Did it make a difference? In 2024, not enough, since Mr. Trump was still re-elected. And this time around, as he has done with everything else that once stood in his way, from Harvard to fancy law firms to the Federal Reserve, he is determined to crush any dissent using any tools he has available. So just the mere possibility of a holdup on a media deal, which could undermine the vast wealth of a media heiress, seems like it could be enough to end an impertinent TV show.

This has happened before. Growing up in the 1980s, I’d often sleep over at my grandfather’s white saltbox house in Greenwich, Conn. Sometimes between episodes of “Murder, She Wrote” and small squares of my grandmother’s excellent homemade carrot cake, which was disappointingly unfrosted, my grandfather Howard Fast would recount his misadventures as an enemy of the state. He wrote screenplays and at least 60 novels, the most famous of which were “April Morning” and “Spartacus.” He wrote political columns for newspapers and magazines.

He refused to name names to the government during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare. He and other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee declined to give records of their organization to the House Un-American Activities Committee and in 1947 were convicted of contempt of Congress. Like Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Trump is not a fan of antifascism.

In 1950, Grandpa ended up in Mill Point Federal Prison in West Virginia. Later, my brother and I would agree that the stint (and the year of media attention) was most likely a huge boon to his writing career. But at the time, in the years after he was imprisoned, the family existed in a state of terror, with Grandpa and his family ending up in Mexico because they couldn’t get passports (back then Mexico didn’t require U.S. citizens to present passports).

Grandpa and Grandma would tell me stories about the Hollywood blacklist. From a young age, I knew his criminal history was far more about an unhinged American government than his doing something wrong. I got that sometimes our country loses its way. But I never thought I would someday live in an America that looked quite so much like my grandfather’s Cold War nightmare. Maybe this is in some ways worse, since there isn’t even a Soviet Union we’re supposedly battling. It’s just to glorify this man, who really doesn’t like to be made fun of.

CBS said that this decision was “not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.” And maybe that’s true. But maybe it was the “guillotine at your head.” Many people in America didn’t need to actually get blacklisted to change their behavior, to turn their friends in, to go along to get along. That’s the point of authoritarian coercion: It’s a motivator.

When I was growing up I knew vaguely that my grandfather had once done something brave, but I didn’t necessarily think of him as a particularly brave guy, he was just a guy — a guy who spent an inordinate amount of time complaining about his books not getting the attention they deserved.

I grew up soft on episodes of “Murphy Brown” and “The West Wing.” I believed that the arc of history bent toward Barack Obama, and technology solving the world’s problems, not causing them. I thought if we could laugh at MAGA hard enough, maybe Mr. Trump would go away, ashamed. But we should realize that under this administration, being funny and famous will not protect you. Even being rich won’t. Meanwhile, the “do not obey in advance” guy, Timothy Snyder, has moved to Canada.

We’ll never be able to mock Mr. Trump into submission. Maybe that was our mistake. A quarter-century ago, there was once a very popular satirical TV show in Russia, too, called “Kukly” (“Puppets”). Vladimir Putin didn’t like being made fun of, either. It was off the air by the end of 2002, and the once-spunky Russian media industry was brought under control by his allies. Mr. Colbert ran a TV show, which is primarily a machine to attract viewers and sell advertising to play for that audience — neither of which it, or any TV show, does as well as it once did — not to change the world. We’ll have to do that ourselves, and we can’t count on the help of the timid billionaires, either, not when they have money at stake.

Source photographs by Justin Setterfield-FIFA/Getty Images and CBS

Molly Jong-Fast is the host of the “Fast Politics” podcast, an MSNBC commentator, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and the author of “How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir.”

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