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On Monday night, the Trump administration made a hefty in-kind donation to a Senate candidate in Texas. But the beneficiary wasn’t incumbent Sen. John Cornyn or even his scandal-plagued challenger, Attorney General Ken Paxton. In fact, it wasn’t a Republican at all.
This slug of earned media went to Democrat James Talarico, who made front-page news after CBS refused to air his appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
On his show, Colbert said he’d been “told in no uncertain terms by our network's lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast."
“Let’s just call this what it is. Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV because all Trump does is watch TV. Okay?” Colbert riffed. “He’s like a toddler with too much screen time. He gets cranky and then drops a load in his diapers.” (Watch below.)
CBS insists that it merely “provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule." But that may be a distinction without much of a difference.
However you parse it, CBS fears provoking the White House and its media enforcer, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, a cartoon villain Colbert likened to a “smug bowling pin.”
Colbert did the interview anyway, relegating it to the Late Show’s YouTube channel where it racked up many more views than it would if it had simply run on CBS as planned. (Watch below.)
Cancel culture today, cancel culture tomorrow, cancel culture forever
Trump rode to power by campaigning against the twin scourges of “cancel culture” and “weaponization” of government.
“One of their political weapons is ‘cancel culture’ — driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees,” Trump railed in 2020 at a rally at Mount Rushmore.
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Four years later, he characterized his own criminal and civil prosecutions as an extension of the left’s campaign to “cancel” the voices of Real Americans.
"They've launched one witch hunt after another to try and stop our movement, to thwart the will of the American people," Trump told his supporters. "In the end, they're not coming after me. They're coming after you."
Back in the White House in 2025, Trump abruptly changed his tune.
He purged the federal government of any mention of racial and sexual minorities, even going so far as to dismantle exhibits on slavery at the Smithsonian and George Washington’s official residence in Philadelphia. He ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to indict his enemies for something — he didn’t care what — even spinning up a “Weaponization Working Group” to prosecute people who dared to go after Republicans for crimes. Orwell could never!
And he aggressively wielded the power of the federal government to police private speech he didn’t like, particularly late night comedians.
FCC Chair Carr is essential to this effort. Carr withheld approval of the Parmount/Skydance merger until CBS agreed to make its news coverage more friendly to conservatives, after which the network announced that Colbert’s show would end in May.