And the two men who were not tired are off the air
Ten years. I have run out of ways to say it. He has not run out of ways to do it.
The comedians got there first. Alec Baldwin won an Emmy in 2017 for putting on the wig, held it up on stage, and dedicated it to the president. This summer he told a reporter there is nothing left to say about Trump. Anthony Atamanuik, who built a season of Comedy Central on the impression, wanted the show to survive because he saw every episode as an essay about life in the United States, and he saw the president as the weight around his neck. Sarah Cooper became famous for mouthing the man’s own sentences back at him and adding nothing to them. She has no desire to do it again. Nothing was left to improve.
Steve Bannon named the method years ago. Flood the zone with shit. I don’t read the articles about what Trump has done. The headlines are enough, along with the safe assumption that it’s bad.
The first term gave us a Sharpie drawing on a hurricane map. The second gave us the Department of Justice.
The Atlantic, reporting this week that everyone has grown too tired to keep track'
So the exhaustion is real, and I have it, and so does everyone reading this. Then you look at what actually took the two loudest voices off the air, and fatigue turns out to have had nothing to do with either one.
On July 14, 2025, Stephen Colbert called the $16 million his parent company had just paid the president to settle a lawsuit a big fat bribe. Three days later, CBS canceled the show. The network said the decision was purely a financial one, unrelated to content. The Late Show was winning its time slot with about 2.4 million viewers a night and was the only program in late night gaining audience that year. Paramount needed federal approval for an $8 billion merger with Skydance. The approval arrived a few weeks later.
In September the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission went on a podcast and told broadcasters they could do this the easy way or the hard way. Within hours, Nexstar and Sinclair pulled Jimmy Kimmel from 66 stations. ABC suspended him that night. He was gone six days. He returned to 6.26 million viewers, the largest audience for a regular episode in the show’s 22 years, in a country where a quarter of all households still could not receive it. Eight days later he drew 1.7 million.
Suppression needs a suppressor. Exhaustion works alone.
PrumpTutin celebrated the Colbert cancellation the day after it was announced, then celebrated again the morning after the final episode aired, 10 months later, in case the first one had not taken. He posted that the firing was simply due to a lack of talent. He posted it about the highest-rated show in late night.
The strongest case against everything I have written here is the historical one, and it is a real case. In 1962 Margaret Mead listened to a comedy record making fun of the Kennedys and told Life magazine that mockery of people in authority was healthy, the difference between democracy and tyranny. Ruth Ben-Ghiat has documented how ridicule cut strongmen down across the last century. The Soviet Union did not fall to firepower. It fell in part to the kitchen joke, repeated by people the state could not fire from jobs it already owned. Ukraine elected a comedian, and he has outlasted every timetable Moscow set for him.
All of it is true. Now notice what none of those jokes had. A shareholder. A merger is pending before a federal regulator. A parent company that needed a signature from the man being mocked. The kitchen joke cost nothing to tell because the teller owned nothing and could lose nothing further. We did it the other way. We built our satire inside corporations, sold it to advertisers, and ran it through licenses granted by an agency the president staffs. Then we called it speech and expected it to behave like speech.
That is the part the exhausted comedians and I have in common, and it is not fatigue. It is the discovery that the joke was never load-bearing. It was a product, and products get discontinued when they cost more than they return; the cost of this one was set by a regulator in September on a podcast.
The Late Show ended on May 21, 33 years after it began. CBS retired the franchise rather than replace the host. The slot was filled the next night.
I am 80 years old, and I would rather not spend what is left of it on this man. But I must. I must not tire. However, I’m going to diversify. Covering the National Debt on Sunday.
The long version of how deception became the product is in The Art of the Lie. Eight years of research. $2.99.