Donald Trump prematurely took a victory lap to celebrate Stephen Colbert’s ouster from CBS. On Friday, the president posted an artificial intelligence-generated video from the official White House account featuring Trump grabbing Colbert from his late-show set and throwing him into a large dumpster while dancing to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”
“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 on Truth Social. “You could take any person off of the street and they would be better than this total jerk. Thank goodness he’s finally gone!”
But less than 24 hours after signing off on his 11-year run as host of CBS’s late-night broadcast, Colbert returned for a guest appearance on “Only in Monroe,” the community access show broadcast in southeast Michigan, which he memorably hosted shortly before taking the reins of “The Late Show” from David Letterman in 2015.
“It’s been an excruciating 23 hours without being on TV,” Colbert said on Friday.
Colbert’s “Only in Monroe” guest appearance was chaotic and funny and warm in a way that no corporate product can be. He crackled with the energy of someone who had nothing left to lose and a great deal left to say.
The episode became an instant viral phenomenon online, featuring appearances from Jack White, Jeff Daniels, Steve Buscemi, Byron Allen and Eminem, who appeared as “Marshall, the Fire Marshal” to authorize burning down the set. Colbert’s “Only in Monroe” guest appearance was chaotic and funny and warm in a way that no corporate product can be. He crackled with the energy of someone who had nothing left to lose and a great deal left to say. One single bootleg upload by independent journalist Matthew Keys amassed well over 600,000 views in a matter of hours.
And then Paramount sent the copyright lawyers.
Over the weekend, the media giant began mass-blocking every single reupload of the “Only in Monroe” episode worldwide. The blocks targets independent, verified journalists and everyday people alike who were merely sharing a public-access broadcast.
A CBS spokesperson rushed to the defense of the network’s censorship apparatus, giving statements to industry trade publications like Variety and Deadline, claiming that CBS Studios had actually financed and secretly produced the public-access episode in collaboration with Monroe Community Media. “As is our regular practice, we send copyright notices to unauthorized websites that post copyrighted content from CBS and our network/studio talent,” the spokesperson asserted, insisting the copyright enforcement was simply routine intellectual-property protection.
But that explanation raised more questions than it answered. Nothing in the broadcast identified CBS or Paramount as producers. There was no corporate copyright message at the end of the hour; instead, an independent, Chicago-based studio was listed as the production company. Colbert also spent much of the episode openly mocking Paramount and CBS in ways that strongly suggested they were not exactly thrilled with the project. So viewers were understandably skeptical that the corporation had lovingly funded an anti-corporate guerrilla comedy special only to immediately suppress its circulation online.
After a backlash erupted, CBS quickly retreated, announcing it would “waive further enforcement” pending additional review.
In other words: They got caught.
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Media consolidation has made American entertainment extraordinarily vulnerable to political intimidation. So when a handful of conglomerates control news divisions, broadcast networks, streaming platforms, movie studios and telecommunications infrastructure simultaneously, political pressure applied in one area quickly infects every other division.
When Paramount, the parent company of CBS, was seeking approval for an $8.4 billion merger with Skydance Media — a deal that required a green light from Trump’s Federal Communications Commission — David Ellison, Skydance’s chief executive, met personally with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and promised that CBS would embrace “varied ideological perspectives” under his watch. Trump, meanwhile, had filed a lawsuit against CBS over its “60 Minutes” editing of a 2024 interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, a lawsuit the network itself had previously called “completely without merit.” In the spring of 2025, Paramount settled that lawsuit for $16 million, payable to Trump’s future presidential library. Shortly thereafter, the FCC approved the Skydance merger. And just days after Colbert called that settlement “a big fat bribe” on his own show, CBS announced it was canceling “The Late Show.” For financial reasons, they said.
The new regime brought in David Rhodes, a longtime Rupert Murdoch lieutenant, and Bari Weiss, editor of the Free Press, as part of the Tiffany Network’s ideological renovation. CBS News president Wendy McMahon resigned, saying publicly that “the company and I do not agree on the path forward.” The longtime executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, had already walked out the door, saying he had “lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”
The irony is that the attempt to silence Colbert appears to have dramatically amplified him instead.
His final “Late Show” episode drew 6.74 million viewers, reportedly the most-watched weeknight broadcast of his tenure. The Monroe appearance then ricocheted across the internet with the kind of viral intensity traditional late-night television has not generated in years. If CBS wanted to erase him from the corporate media machine, Colbert would simply route around the machine itself.
It was a textbook Streisand effect. The harder CBS tried to contain the moment, the bigger it became.
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