President Donald Trump took to Truth Social Thursday night to mark the final episode of "The Late Show" with Stephen Colbert, calling the departing host a "total jerk" and declaring the end of the 11-season CBS program long overdue.
The post landed minutes after Colbert signed off for the last time from the Ed Sullivan Theatre in New York, a venue synonymous with American television history now closing a chapter that, for conservatives, symbolized late-night TV's full transformation into a partisan megaphone.
CBS canceled Colbert and his show last July. The network maintained the decision was "purely" for financial reasons, as Breitbart News reported. But the timing told its own story: the cancellation came just days after Colbert publicly mocked Paramount, CBS's parent company, for paying Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit while the company was pursuing a merger with Skydance that required federal approval.
Trump's Truth Social message left little room for ambiguity about his feelings toward the host who made anti-Trump commentary a nightly fixture for nearly a decade.
"Colbert is finally finished at CBS. Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person. 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 language was vintage Trump, personal, blunt, and clearly aimed at a figure who had made the president a near-constant target. Breitbart described Colbert as "so often a Trump target and obsession in equal measures," a framing that captures the strange co-dependency between the two men across the show's run.
Colbert used his last broadcast to take one more swing at the corporate machinery above him. He joked about Paramount's $16 million payment to Trump, calling the parent company's agreement with the president a "big, fat bribe" tied to the Skydance merger.
The merger required federal approval, a fact that gave the payment its political charge. Whether Colbert's willingness to say so publicly played any role in CBS's decision to end the show remains an open question the network has not directly addressed.
Colbert opened the finale with a knowing nod to the audience: "If you're just tuning into the Late Show, you've missed a lot."
The final episode featured celebrity cameos from Paul McCartney, Bryan Cranston, Tim Meadows, Paul Rudd, and Tig Notaro, a farewell lineup heavy on Hollywood goodwill. For viewers who had long since tuned out, the send-off was a reminder of just how deeply embedded "The Late Show" had become in the entertainment establishment's political ecosystem.
Trump's post zeroed in on ratings, "no talent, no ratings, no life", and Breitbart's coverage described the show as "basement-rated," noting it "had sunk to an even deeper new low with viewers." Specific viewership numbers were not cited, but the broader trajectory of late-night television ratings has been well documented across the industry. Audiences have shrunk dramatically over the past decade, and politically charged monologues have accelerated the departure of viewers who simply want to laugh before bed.
CBS's insistence that the cancellation was "purely" financial raises its own questions. Who at the network made that statement, and what financial benchmarks did "The Late Show" fail to meet? Those details remain unaddressed. The word "purely" does a lot of heavy lifting when a host was publicly accusing his own corporate parent of bribing the sitting president just days before the axe fell.
Colbert's departure does not happen in a vacuum. Late-night television was once a shared cultural space, Johnny Carson could make a president squirm without turning half the country into the enemy. That era ended gradually, then all at once. Colbert's version of "The Late Show" became, for millions of conservative viewers, unwatchable, not because of sharp political humor, but because of relentless, one-directional contempt aimed at roughly half the electorate.
The result was predictable. Audiences fractured. Ratings declined. And CBS eventually pulled the plug, wrapping the decision in the language of fiscal responsibility.
Trump, for his part, was never going to let the moment pass without comment. The president has long understood that responding to his critics, especially in media and entertainment, keeps the scoreboard visible. His Truth Social post was less a victory lap than a receipt.
The $16 million settlement between Paramount and Trump, which Colbert referenced on air, remains one of the murkier elements of this story. The case name and court docket were not identified in available reporting. What is clear is that the payment coincided with Paramount's push for federal approval of its Skydance merger, a timeline that gave Colbert his punchline and gave critics of the deal their talking point.
Colbert calling the settlement a "big, fat bribe" was the kind of line that plays well in a Manhattan studio audience. Whether it played well in the Paramount boardroom is another matter. Within days, the show was canceled.
CBS has not explained whether Colbert's on-air commentary about the settlement factored into the decision. The network's "purely" financial explanation stands as the only official word. Draw your own conclusions.
With Colbert gone, CBS faces a question that goes beyond one time slot: Can the network reclaim viewers who left during the years when late-night hosts treated half the country as a punchline? The Ed Sullivan Theatre is dark for now. No successor has been announced in the available reporting.
For Trump, the post-Colbert landscape is simple. One more critic is off the air. The president's platform, Truth Social, remains very much on.
When the people who built their careers on mocking you keep losing their audiences, you don't need to gloat. The ratings already said it.
