Colbert has been highly critical of Trump for years, and panned the company for agreeing\u00a0to a $16-million US settlement with the president\u00a0earlier this month<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 which he\u00a0said was paid to him today, though the money is to\u00a0be allocated to his future presidential library.<\/p>\n Both CBS and Colbert announced the news on Thursday, but Colbert took the opportunity in Monday night’s opening monologue to question the motivation for the decision.<\/p>\n He joked that “cancel culture had gone too far,” but said he could now\u00a0share his “unvarnished” opinions of Trump.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I don’t care for him,” Colbert joked about the president,\u00a0who was a Late Show guest during his first election campaign in 2015,\u00a0which was also\u00a0Colbert’s inaugural year on the program.<\/p>\n The host addressed his own “blistering” critique of the settlement,\u00a0which he had made on air days before the cancellation was announced.\u00a0Though he didn’t explicitly tie the two events together, he questioned how it could possibly be a “financial decision” when his program was the top rated in the late-night category.<\/p>\n He recognized the network’s potential constraints \u2014 especially following the multimillion-dollar payout \u2014 but also mentioned how Trump, in a post on Truth Social<\/a>, celebrated the show’s cancellation.<\/p>\n “I absolutely love that Colbert\u00a0got fired,” Trump wrote. “His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the moron on NBC who ruined the once-great Tonight Show.”<\/p>\n Colbert’s response to Trump on Monday night: “Go f–k yourself.”\u00a0<\/p>\n WATCH | Colbert addresses CBS ‘killing off’ his show in opening monologue:<\/p>\n Stewart savages CBS, Trump<\/p>\n Aside from Colbert, The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart had the harshest comments for CBS.<\/p>\n He admitted late-night TV was struggling:\u00a0“We’re all basically operating a Blockbuster kiosk inside of a Tower Records,” he joked.\u00a0<\/p>\n But he said CBS “lost the benefit of the doubt” after the\u00a0settlement, which\u00a0others at the network<\/a>\u00a0and across the industry have criticized and tied to Paramount Global’s pending merger with movie and TV studio Skydance.<\/p>\n “Was this purely financial or maybe the path of least resistance to your $8-billion [US] merger?”\u00a0said Stewart, adding that Paramount Global also owns the network he works for, Comedy Central.<\/p>\n WATCH | Stewart slams CBS in Daily Show monologue (Contains profanity):<\/p>\n “But understand this. Truly, the shows that you now seek to cancel, censor and control \u2014\u00a0a\u00a0not-insignificant portion of that\u00a0$8-billion value\u00a0came from those f–king shows,” he said before leading a\u00a0chorus of “go f–k yourself” aimed at companies, advertisers and law firms that “bend the knee” to Trump.\u00a0<\/p>\n WATCH | Questions swirl around cancellation of Late Show: Why CBS axed The Late Show: Ratings or politics?<\/p>\n Questions are swirling over whether the cancellation of Stephen Colbert\u2019s Late Show was politically motivated or purely financial. Colbert alluded to a ‘bribe’ tied to a Trump lawsuit and a corporate deal.A little love from Letterman?<\/p>\n Colbert first dipped his toes into the late-night waters alongside Stewart\u00a0on The Daily Show from 1999 to 2005,\u00a0before launching his own Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, which ran for 10 years. He eventually\u00a0landed his current gig after the original Late Show host, David Letterman, retired.\u00a0<\/p>\n Though Letterman has not made any official statement, he appeared to take a stance on Monday.\u00a0<\/p>\n A 20-minute video appeared on his YouTube channel, with a montage of clips featuring him mocking CBS on Late Show with David Letterman over the years.\u00a0<\/p>\n Letterman launched the venerable talk\u00a0show in 1993, moving to CBS\u00a0from NBC, where he had hosted Late Night with David Letterman, airing after The Tonight Show for 11 years.<\/p>\n WATCH | Letterman mocks\u00a0CBS over the years:<\/p>\n Over at NBC, Jimmy Fallon joked Monday night<\/a> that he was still the host of The Tonight Show,\u00a0“at least for tonight.”\u00a0<\/p>\n Fallon applauded Colbert’s run as Late Show host, but took a lighter tone, joking that boycotts could cause CBS to lose millions of viewers, as well as “tens of hundreds watching on Paramount Plus.”\u00a0<\/p>\n Host Jimmy Kimmel\u00a0is currently on summer\u00a0break from his show on ABC, although he reacted to the situation on Instagram<\/a> last week, saying, “F–k you and all your Sheldons CBS,”\u00a0referencing\u00a0the character Sheldon Cooper\u00a0on the CBS sitcoms\u00a0The Big Bang Theory\u00a0and\u00a0Young Sheldon.\u00a0<\/p>\n Colbert got no love, however, from one top-rated late-night (late-evening, really) host: Fox News Channel’s Greg Gutfeld, whom Trump praised in his post celebrating the Colbert cancellation, and who hosts the show\u00a0Gutfeld!<\/p>\n Gutfeld dismissed claims that Colbert was being censored, saying\u00a0CBS is\u00a0“free to fire someone who’s stinking up a\u00a0market like they took a dump in the produce section.”\u00a0<\/p>\n He also touted that his show draws higher ratings<\/a> than Colbert’s\u00a0(though this could also be because his show airs about an hour and a half before the major late-night programs).<\/p>\n It should come as little surprise that Gutfeld, a right-wing comedian and commentator,\u00a0took swipes at Colbert, as Fox News Channel is generally favourable to Trump.\u00a0<\/p>\n But as Stewart noted in his rant, Trump is also suing Rupert Murdoch<\/a>, whose News Corp owns both Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, over\u00a0the latter publication’s\u00a0story about a crude\u00a0letter the president purportedly wrote\u00a0in 2003<\/a> to the now-deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.<\/p>\n WATCH | How will late-night TV change with Colbert’s show cancellation?: CBS cancels Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. What’s next for late-night comedy? | Hanomansing Tonight<\/p>\n CBS is cancelling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert after 33 years on air. Host Stephen Colbert made the announcement to the audience at a taping on Thursday, just days after he spoke out against Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There was a show of late-night solidarity on Monday night\u00a0as The Late Show host Stephen Colbert’s comrades\u00a0rallied behind…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16444,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,348],"class_list":["post-16443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/the-late-show-donald-trump.jpg\")
Then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared on the The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2015, but recently celebrated news of the program’s pending cancellation last week. (John Paul Filo\/CBS via Associated Press)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1753221668_85_default.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/stephen-colbert-cancellation-protest.jpg\")
People participate in a protest titled ‘Colbert stays! Trump must go!’ outside the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York on Monday. (Charly Triballeau\/AFP\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1753221668_164_default.jpg\")
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