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The decision by CBS to cancel "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" dropped like a nuclear warhead on the media landscape last week, but to fully understand the comedian's rise and fall, you have to remember his roots as a fake Republican.
Colbert rose to fame through Comedy Central’s "The Daily Show," in the early 2000’s, earning himself his own news parody show on the network, "The Colbert Report" in 2005. From that satirical anchor chair, he posed as a conservative talking head for almost a decade.
The character that was created was a Ron Burgundy-like conservative buffoon, or as Colbert would put it, a "well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot."
He would wear this costume for 20 years.
In other words, for two decades now, Stephen Colbert has been consumed in the role of a pre-Donald Trump, Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan style Republican that, in that time, has gone from being reviled to fondly remembered by the left.
Late-night host Stephen Colbert brought up reports that CBS News' president wanted the network's news division to lay off bad Trump stories on Tuesday during an interview with Rachel Maddow. (Screenshot/Colbert)
Many of us are old enough to remember when former President George W. Bush was considered by liberals to be a war criminal who should go directly to jail. But today, there is a strange new respect for W in the wake of Trump.
What Colbert was really playing was the lovable and gullible loser that the word "Republican" represented before the Orange Man went bad. This was a Republican who, in retrospect, at least, was greedy, maybe a bit stupid, but not a supposed threat to democracy.
In September 2015, just over a year before Trump would shock the universe with his defeat of Hillary Clinton, Colbert took over the vaunted "The Late Show" from David Letterman. But which Colbert would it be, the real one, or the character he created?
"The Tonight Show" original host Johnny Carson didn't alienate people with political preaching. Instead, he made everyone laugh. -- Photo by: Alice S. Hall/NBCU Photo Bank (Getty Images)
Not long after Colbert took the hot seat at "The Late Show," a new term was beginning to bubble up in the societal ether: "Never Trump." With it came a sorting. Some Republicans, and we know who they are, made opposing Trump their entire mission. Colbert’s character was squarely among them.
What was fascinating was that even though Colbert had only been pretending to be a conservative for a decade in 2015, his performance gave his criticisms of Trump an extra bite, just as Never Trump ex-GOP officials have on CNN and MSNBC in the age of Trump.
For 10 years now, Colbert has toggled between ridiculous musical numbers urging his viewers to trust the "experts" and the Left on everything from vaccines to election interference, and putting on his black thick-rimmed glasses for a serious monologue about the evils of Trump.
Just as is the case with Never Trump pundits, Colbert’s Never Trump late night TV host is not only tired now, but utterly pointless and irrelevant. The Republican that Colbert has spent his career pretending to be, simply doesn’t exist anymore.
As news of Colbert’s cancellation spread, we saw from the usual suspects on the Left dire warnings about government censorship and authoritarianism. It's all a flaming bag of nonsense.
If, as these wackos presume, CBS buckled to Trump to get their parent company Paramount’s merger with Skydance past the administration even though Colbert is the biggest star in late night, then surely a rival network would scoop him up. That’s how value in entertainment works.
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But the problem for Colbert is that the entire basis of his character, and frankly, career, has disintegrated under his feet as it has for so many who made their entire lives about defeating Donald Trump.
Colbert’s caricature of a mid-level manager white guy who just wants low taxes and his kids not to be gay and doesn’t read books depicts nobody in reality. It is a figment of elite, urban, progressive fearmongers.
It was another famous late-night host named Johnny Carson who once turned the tables on legendary insult comedian Don Rickles, by quipping, "Don is a great comedian, I love his joke."
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Sadly, though Carson was kidding, this really is the fate that Colbert suffered. He only had one joke, and that joke isn’t funny anymore.
So, RIP to the "Late Show" and to Never Trump, two things that time and fortune have passed by, under the watchful eye of Donald J. Trump.
