U.S. President Donald Trump is calling for late-night host Stephen Colbert to be taken off the air immediately, referring to him as a “dead man walking.”
“Stephen Colbert is a pathetic trainwreck, with no talent or anything else necessary for show business success,” Trump wrote. “Now, after being terminated by CBS, but left out to dry, he has actually gotten worse, along with his nonexistent ratings.”
Trump said Colbert is “running on hatred and fumes.”
“A dead man walking! CBS should, ‘put him to sleep,’ NOW, it is the humanitarian thing to do,” Trump added to his midnight diatribe.
A screenshot of Donald Trump’s Truth Social post.
@realDonaldTrump / Truth Social
In a follow-up post, Trump asked: “Who has the worst Late Night host, CBS, ABC, or NBC??? They all have three things in common: High Salaries, No Talent, REALLY LOW RATINGS!”
“If Network NEWSCASTS, and their Late Night Shows, are almost 100% Negative to President Donald J. Trump, MAGA, and the Republican Party, shouldn’t their very valuable Broadcast Licenses be terminated? I say, YES,” Trump added.
A screenshot of Donald Trump’s Truth Social post.
@realDonaldTrump / Truth Social
Trump appeared to take aim at Colbert after CBS aired a rerun of his Dec. 8 episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert hours after broadcasting The Kennedy Center Honors, hosted by Trump.
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This isn’t the first time Trump has taken aim at Colbert this year.
In July, the U.S. president celebrated CBS’s decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, with the final episode set to air in May 2026.
“I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Colbert responded to Trump with some choice words during an opening monologue of his show.
“Over the weekend, it sunk in that they’re killing off our show but they made one mistake: they left me alive,” Colbert said, looking directly into the camera. “And now for the next 10 months, the gloves are off. I can finally speak unvarnished truth to power and say what I really think about Donald Trump, starting right now.”
Colbert said he doesn’t “care for” Trump, adding that he doesn’t think he has “the skill set to be president” and isn’t “a good fit.”
Colbert then read Trump’s post from Truth Social and said into the “Eloquence Cam”: “How dare you, sir? Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism? Go f— yourself.”
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Trump responded to Colbert and claimed that he had nothing to do with the cancellation of the show.
In a post on Truth Social in late July, Trump said “everybody” thinks he was “solely responsible” for the end of the late-night talk show but he said the rumours are “not true!”
“Everybody is saying that I was solely responsible for the firing of Stephen Colbert from CBS, ‘Late Night,’” Trump wrote. “That is not true! The reason he was fired was a pure lack of TALENT, and the fact that this deficiency was costing CBS $50 Million Dollars a year in losses — And it was only going to get WORSE!”
Trump went on to claim that “an even less talented Jimmy Kimmel” will be “next up” to lose his job, followed by “a weak, and very insecure, Jimmy Fallon.”
“The only real question is, who will go first? Show Biz and Television is a very simple business. If you get Ratings, you can say or do anything. If you don’t, you always become a victim,” Trump wrote. “Colbert became a victim to himself, the other two will follow.”
In August, Trump doubled down on his claims that late-night hosts Kimmel and Fallon were next to lose their jobs.
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