The end is nigh for late-night shows where venomous hosts try to pass off political hate speech as entertainment, President Donald Trump declared Friday after Stephen Colbert aired the last episode of The Late Show on CBS.
“Stephen Colbert’s firing from CBS was the ‘Beginning of the End’ for untalented, nasty, highly overpaid, not funny, and very poorly rated Late Night Television Hosts,” Trump predicted in a TruthSocial.com post:
“Others, of even less talent, to soon follow. May they all Rest in Peace! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
For years, Colbert has consistently abandoned humor in order to use his show’s platform to launch vicious personal and political attacks against Trump. As of Thursday, CBS has canceled Colbert’s late-night program, purportedly for financial reasons.
“Colbert is finally finished at CBS. Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person,” Trump wrote in a separate post, adding that “You could take any person off of the street and they would be better than this total jerk.”
“Thank goodness he’s finally gone!” the president concluded.
A new poll adds credence to Trump’s prediction about the fate of today’s crop of hateful, agenda-driven late-night hosts such as Colbert and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, who was suspended last September for making false and malicious comments on his show regarding the assassination of conservative Charlie Kirk.
In a national survey conducted May 15-18, 2026, The Economist/YouGov asked U.S. adult citizens who they thought was “the best late-night comedian on TV.”
Fully 38% chose “None of the above” – three times the number who selected any of the top-rated hosts on NBC (Jimmy Fallon), CBS (Stephen Colbert), ABC (Jimmy Kimmel) and Fox News Channel (Greg Gutfeld), all of whom ended up in a virtual tie, garnering 11%-13% of the vote. Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart (8%) and HBO’s John Oliver (5%) drew single-digit percentages of the vote for best late-night comedian.
The popularity of “none” is emblematic of the long-term trend of viewers losing interest in late-night shows. Taken together, late-night talk shows have not been profitable since 2022, with losses steadily increasing each year.
