The White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner is one of the most cringe institutions in Washington, D.C. Fatuously known as “Nerd Prom,” the event, with its red carpets and celebrity guests, is a relic of a time when the press and the political establishment could pretend the country wasn’t descending rapidly into total dysfunction. By 2006, with the country mired in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and Americans souring on President George W. Bush, the ceremony had already outlived its dubious rationale. But the time was ripe for an epic roast of establishment journalism and politics.
Enter Stephen Colbert. The comedian was already establishing himself as one of the master parodists of our time. On his nightly Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report,” he had perfected the character of a right-wing pundit — modeled on then-Fox News star Bill O’Reilly — that skewered Republicans, the conservative press and the Bush administration. At that year’s WHCA dinner, appearing in the guise of his alter ego, Colbert did it right to their faces. While it caused a stir, with some commentary suggesting he had perhaps “gone too far,” nobody sued anyone or had a public tantrum.
[Colbert’s] political satire remained just as sharp, especially when Donald Trump came on the political scene that same year. Trump — who is not known to have a sense of humor, certainly not about himself — would not have been amused.
Colbert would eventually shed his conservative character when he took over CBS’s “The Late Show” after David Letterman retired in 2015. But his political satire remained just as sharp, especially when Donald Trump came on the political scene that same year. Trump — who is not known to have a sense of humor, certainly not about himself — would not have been amused.
As host of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” the comedian has been successful, receiving critical praise and leading the program to regularly becoming the top-rated late-night show, outpacing his younger rivals Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel — albeit against the backdrop of what Reuters termed “late-night TV’s fade-out.” Once an enduring ritual for TV viewers, the format has struggled for years, as audiences have switched from cable to streaming services and looked online for their entertainment.
This past week, Colbert was fired by Paramount, the parent company of CBS, in the wake of its $16 million settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the company. (The suit accused CBS’s “60 Minutes” of editing an October 2024 interview with then-Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to the candidate’s benefit. As the program was following conventional journalistic practices, no one expected Trump to prevail. But as has been widely pointed out, Paramount Chairwoman Shari Redstone is selling CBS to Skydance Media in an $8.4 billion merger that will require governmental approval by the Federal Communications Commission.) Colbert had blasted the company for the settlement on “Late Night,” a move that must have infuriated Redstone. Soon after, Paramount announced Colbert’s firing and that CBS would be ending “The Late Show” altogether, insisting the move was purely a financial decision having nothing to do with the settlement, which no one believes.
It’s hard to know which would be worse: If Trump demanded that Colbert be fired and they agreed to do it, or if they fired him as a little gesture of good will to please the president. Either way, it’s horrific. But it’s also par for the course these days, as one institution after another caves to the most serious threat to free speech since the Red Scare of the 1950s.
For his part, Colbert has not gone quietly. With 10 months left on his contract, he has apparently decided to make the most of his time. On Monday night’s show he responded to Trump, who had written in an ecstatic Truth Social post, “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings.” After quoting Trump, Colbert looked at the camera in mock indignation. “How dare you, sir? Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism?” As an on-screen frame appeared that said “Eloquence Cam,” Colbert told Trump: “Go f**k yourself.”
The late-night host also recruited Lin-Manuel Miranda and “Weird Al” Yankovic to parody Coldplay’s now-infamous kiss cam. As Miranda, Yankovic and the in-house band performed Coldplay’s hit “Viva La Vida” — with Weird Al on accordion — the studio’s cameras panned the audience and found a variety of “couples” who were there to stand in solidarity with Colbert: his late-night competitors Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen, Jon Stewart and John Oliver, and Adam Sandler and Christopher McDonald.
It would be easy to shrug all this off — it’s only a comedian losing a job. Big deal. But as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes put it in a post on X, “Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country’s leader on TV without repercussions.”
Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
Of their settlement with Trump, Paramount issued a statement saying the agreement “does not include PSAs or anything related to PSAs.” But Skydance didn’t comment, fueling speculation that this “side deal” may have come from their side. The New York Post and Fox News both reported that the company is happy to set aside time “in support of conservative causes” in the future.
If that’s true, Skydance has agreed to become a full-fledged propaganda arm of the Trump administration, which may seem somewhat quaint considering that Fox News already fills that role. But such a decision would take conservative media to a whole new level, following the playbook of the modern authoritarian states like Hungary and Russia.
No one is safe, not even the right-wing media. Last week Trump filed a $20 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal’s publisher Dow Jones and its parent company, News Corp. — which also owns Fox News — over the newspaper’s decision to publish a story alleging Trump had once sent his one-time friend Jeffrey Epstein a “bawdy” birthday card. Chairman Rupert Murdoch was apparently unmoved by entreaties from Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance to spike the story before its publication; Vance reportedly traveled to Montana last week to meet with Murdoch in person. So far, the paper has stood by its story.
But it remains to be seen if Murdoch, too, will find a way to settle and make Trump feel like a big winner. That seems to be how this works. But it’s still startling to realize that Trump’s paeans to free speech — and all those of the pro-Trump free speech warriors, who called for the fainting couch over the Biden administration’s requests that the social media companies monitor COVID disinformation — are now completely forgotten.
We need your help to stay independent
These aren’t the only examples of Trump and his henchmen cracking down on free expression. They are arresting and detaining people based upon their writings in student newspapers. They are demanding that private institutions like universities, corporations and law firms ban any discussion of diversity and inclusion, or face losing vital funding and civil rights lawsuits from the Department of Justice. In what was seen as a bid to distract the media and the American public from the roiling controversy over the department’s decision to not release the Epstein files, Trump even threatened to pull support for a new football stadium in Washington, D.C., unless the team reinstates the racist “Redskins” name.
The president seems to be engaging in blackmail, pure and simple. With many of our institutions caving to his threats to block their ability to do business and refusing to defend their own freedoms, it looks like it will be up to comedians to fight the power.
