Trump won this battle
Tonight at 11:35, something happened in the United States of America that should never have happened. After years of personal obsession with silencing voices that speak truthfully about him, the President of the United States was successful in removing a comedian from the air in an effort to control what millions of Americans are allowed to see, hear, laugh at, and think about. This will be remembered in the history books as one of the darkest modern assaults on the First Amendment of the Constitution and a deeply dangerous escalation for our country into authoritarianism.
Stephen Colbert’s show was number one, and he was winning his timeslot when CBS announced it was pulling the plug. They called it “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.” But you do not cancel the most-watched late-night show to save money. You cancel it for another reason, and we all know what that reason was.
Shortly before the announcement, Colbert stood in front of his audience and openly criticized his own parent company, Paramount, for paying Donald Trump sixteen million dollars to settle a lawsuit over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview, a lawsuit Paramount itself had previously described as “meritless.” He said he did not know whether anything could restore his trust in the company, before joking that maybe sixteen million dollars would help. Then, during his monologue, he went even further, saying the technical legal term for the deal between CBS and Trump was “a big fat bribe.”
Three days later, his show was canceled. And the timing was no coincidence, because Paramount had an eight-billion-dollar sale to Skydance pending, and that sale needed approval from Trump’s FCC. Colbert told the truth about the bribe and the upcoming deal, and then the company that paid it took him off the air.
And here is the part that tells you everything about the man in the Oval Office. When the cancellation was announced, Trump did not stay quiet. He celebrated. He went on his platform and wrote, “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired.” A sitting president openly gloating that one of his most prominent critics had been removed from television. He even added that he heard Jimmy Kimmel was “next.”
Colbert did not bend even after that. He pushed harder. From the moment he was handed his own ending, he used every night he had left to tell the truth louder and call out exactly what Donald Trump was doing to our country. Even sending a message directly to the President shortly after the cancellation was announced, using language the president understands, “go f— yourself.” And he kept saying that for the next ten months. The gloves were off, he could finally speak unvarnished truth to power, and he said exactly what he thought of Donald Trump. He joked that this was “worse than fascism.” He turned his own execution into ten months of defiance. And tonight, after thirty-three years of The Late Show on CBS, and after eleven years of Colbert behind that desk at the Ed Sullivan Theatre, the lights went down for the last time.
And as tragic as what happened to Colbert is, I have full faith that he will ultimately come out stronger on the other side of this. Hurt, shaken, and undoubtedly exhausted from years of being targeted by a President of the United States and treated almost like an enemy of the state for doing his job. But Stephen Colbert will continue being a beacon of truth, humor, and moral clarity during one of the most dangerous periods in modern American history. Men like Trump cannot create voices like his, and that is precisely why they fear them so much.
But what happened to Colbert is bigger than one man losing a platform. What we are really losing is one of the largest mainstream voices in the resistance, someone capable of reaching millions of Americans who are not glued to political coverage every day. People who may never sit down to watch cable news or read lengthy political analysis still invited Stephen Colbert into their homes every night. They came to laugh, to decompress, to feel human again after exhausting days, and in the process, they were also exposed to truth, accountability, and the normalization of speaking openly about what is happening in this country.
That is the real reason authoritarian movements target comedians so aggressively. Not because comedy is meaningless, but because it is influential. Humor lowers defenses. It reaches people in ways that propaganda cannot fully reach. It creates connection, community, and shared understanding in moments when fear is designed to isolate us from one another. They did not just want Stephen Colbert gone. They wanted the platform gone. The nightly reminder to millions of Americans that powerful people can still be mocked, questioned, and challenged publicly. Comedians make the powerful look small, and nothing frightens a strongman more than being laughed at. That is why this has always been one of the first moves in the playbook. In Nazi Germany, the regime went after cabaret performers and satirists who mocked the Reich. In the Soviet Union, comedians who went too far disappeared from the stage. Every authoritarian movement eventually comes for the people who make the population laugh at its leaders, because laughter is proof that the fear has not fully taken hold. And when the laughter stops, they know they are winning.
Colbert was not the first, and he will not be the last voice silenced. We have watched this administration come for the press over and over again. They came for Jimmy Kimmel, who was suspended by ABC last year after Trump’s FCC chairman publicly pressured the network. The one time a company actually held the line, when Disney and ABC brought Kimmel back and refused to cave, it showed us exactly what was possible when a corporation chooses its audience over the President’s favor. CBS chose differently.
This is just another moment of Trump executing his plan to completely silence anyone willing to speak the truth. Trump hates the media, and he already told us why, years ago, to one of CBS’s own. Lesley Stahl, the longtime 60 Minutes correspondent, once asked him off-camera why he attacked the press over and over, and he told her plainly, “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”
He has spent every year since proving he meant it. He has come for individual reporters, attacking them by name from the White House podium and aboard Air Force One, calling them stupid, nasty, piggy, and even more recently a b*itch. He and his administration have come for entire newsrooms with threats to broadcast licenses. They settled lawsuits that should never have been settled, paid money that looked exactly like what Colbert called it, and then they removed the people who said so out loud. This is not a series of unrelated business decisions. This is the steady consolidation of money, power, and truth into a smaller and smaller funnel, until the only voices left standing are the ones the President has approved.
And they told us this was coming. Earlier this month, the White House Press Secretary stood at that podium and laid the groundwork in plain language, telling the country that those who call this president a fascist, who compare him to history, who speak out against him, were responsible for violence and were engaged in a crime. What she delivered was a warning that dissent itself was going to be treated as dangerous. Tonight we saw the next level of their plan to silence us all.
What happened tonight also sends a chilling message to every journalist, writer, comedian, entertainer, and ordinary person still speaking out: Trump has no limits when it comes to punishing voices he views as disloyal. Stephen Colbert was taken off the air because the President wanted him gone, and because a corporation seeking political favor ultimately decided compliance was safer than resistance.
I’ve been bracing myself for tonight. Because after writing these posts every night for more than a year now, I’ve started to recognize the pattern. Whenever Trump publicly targets someone for speaking out, the ugliest, most disturbing, and most unhinged messages begin flooding into my inboxes and messages, almost immediately afterward. It is never just criticism. It is intimidation, threats, and rage. Sometimes explicit fantasies about violence. And far too often, they drag my family into it too.
It has gotten bad enough that I now need help filtering through emails and messages because some of them are genuinely horrifying to read. Especially the ones mentioning my children or the people I love. That is part of what this movement does. It tries to wear people down psychologically until silence feels safer than speaking.
And I know the next few days will probably bring another wave of it, because what happened to Colbert tonight sends a message to Trump loyalists that intimidation works. That if they scream loudly enough, threaten aggressively enough, pressure corporations hard enough, eventually people will disappear. But what they still do not understand is this: it will not work on me. And it did not work on Stephen Colbert either.
He may have lost his show, but he did not lose his voice. If anything, tonight proved how powerful that voice actually was. Powerful enough that a President of the United States spent years obsessing over silencing it. Powerful enough that corporations became afraid of standing beside it. Powerful enough that millions of Americans looked to it nightly for truth, humor, relief, and reassurance that they were not losing their minds watching all of this happen.
And for those of us still speaking out, writing about what is happening to our country, sharing information with others, organizing, resisting, and refusing to normalize this madness, we have a responsibility now to carry that resistance forward ourselves. Because Stephen Colbert lost something deeply meaningful to him tonight, and he lost it because he refused to stop speaking honestly during dangerous times. Some things really are worth risking everything for. Our freedom is one of them. Our country is one of them.
I talk often about what I call financial resistance, especially during moments when it feels like we are helplessly watching the destruction of our country. Over the past several months, I have become increasingly intentional about where every dollar I spend goes. It is not a perfect science by any means, and none of us are going to get it right every single time, but I genuinely believe that money is one of the last forms of power ordinary people still fully control. And when spent consciously, every dollar can become an act of protest.
I try to make sure the businesses and services I support are not openly aligning themselves with authoritarianism or helping normalize what is happening in this country. I intentionally buy from companies that have taken public stands when it mattered. I support independent journalism and independent media through paid subscriptions because I understand that truth does not survive for free under systems like this. It survives because ordinary people decide it is worth protecting.
And on nights like tonight, I feel even more strongly about that. Because every paid subscription to independent media, every dollar sent directly to a writer, journalist, comedian, podcaster, filmmaker, or outlet still willing to speak honestly, becomes a direct rejection of what happened tonight. It becomes a private act of resistance against the growing effort to silence dissent and intimidate people into submission. The people behind this movement want critical voices weakened, isolated, defunded, exhausted, and eventually erased. They want all of us quiet.
So we answer by making sure the people who refuse to be quiet can keep going. And when we do that together, it sends an even larger message than we realize. Because as corporate media increasingly bends itself around political pressure and billionaire interests, independent media becomes one of the last places where truth can still exist freely. But independent media only survives if ordinary people choose to fund it directly.
So tonight, if you are able, I hope you will consider joining me in that economic resistance. And please think beyond just my work when you do. I appreciate every one of your paid subscriptions. It means the world to me that you appreciate what I do, and it helps me to get this message out to more people. And beyond my own work, I’d love for you to consider the other independent voices you rely on for honesty. If they offer a paid option and you are financially able to support them, please consider doing so. Because every subscription to an independent voice is a vote against everything that happened tonight. It is us privately funding the people they are most afraid to let speak. And if you are already supporting your favorite independent voices, I would also encourage you to consider supporting PBS. Public broadcasting matters deeply during moments like these, too.
With Stephen Colbert gone, we are going to have to work even harder to make sure the truth about what is happening in this country still reaches people. Because buried underneath all the chaos, intimidation, distractions, and constant outrage, Trump floods the country with every single day, we are also beginning to see cracks forming inside his own movement. Even some of the people who enabled all of this are starting to discover there are limits to what they can publicly go along with.
Today, Republicans who control both chambers of Congress literally fled Washington rather than publicly stand beside him.
They were supposed to vote on the President’s priorities before leaving for the Memorial Day recess. Instead, House leadership abruptly canceled a vote on the Iran War Powers resolution, not once but twice, because they did not have the votes to defeat it.
And this came immediately after Republican members of Congress crossed party lines to advance a resolution aimed at stopping further military strikes tied to a war Congress never authorized in the first place. And it was not just about the war. Republicans also walked away from Trump’s own seventy billion dollar funding package, which included massive new funding increases for ICE and DHS, along with roughly a billion dollars connected to security and infrastructure tied to Trump’s absurd vanity ballroom project at the White House. Leadership did not even want the votes on the record because there were real concerns they could lose those too. So instead of forcing members to publicly choose, they sent everyone home until June.
Think about how extraordinary that is for a moment. A party that controls the House, the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court still became so politically afraid of their own voters and the public backlash that they chose to run from the votes entirely rather than defend them openly. Now, this was not courage. It was not a moral awakening. And it certainly was not decency. The war continues without authorization, regardless, which is its own quiet nightmare. These Republicans are not suddenly heroes. They are afraid. Afraid of town halls. Afraid of constituents. Afraid of attaching their names permanently to Trump’s war, Trump’s slush fund, and Trump’s grotesque ballroom vanity project, while public anger continues growing around them.
But here is the important part: that fear did not appear out of nowhere. We put it there. All the protesting, organizing, and pressure. All the refusal to normalize this. It matters. A regime that feels fully secure does not run from its own votes. A movement that feels universally supported does not panic about public backlash.
Yes, they took one of the bravest voices we had off the air. But Stephen Colbert spent the last ten months proving something incredibly important: you can take away someone’s platform and still fail to take away their voice. Tonight, it becomes our responsibility to carry that resistance forward ourselves, louder than before. They wanted us to be quiet. Instead, they are about to discover that instead, they created the loudest resistance movement yet. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
PS. You can make a significant difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. Your support helps me cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in this country.
This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: Feeling very lucky today to have such supportive writing buddies.
Sources:
https://abcnews.com/US/stephen-colberts-late-show-canceled-cbs-citing-financial/story?id=123851902
https://deadline.com/2025/07/stephen-colbert-trump-60-minutes-settlement-paramount-1236457376/
https://deadline.com/2025/07/the-daily-show-jon-stewart-reaction-colbert-cancelation-1236464269/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/06/media/cbs-colbert-byron-allen-late-show-comics-unleashed
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-called-reporter-piggy/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/21/politics/house-trump-iran-war-powers
https://www.ms.now/news/house-adopts-war-powers-resolution-iran-trump
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/ballroom-funding-trump-congress-immigration-funding.html
This is exactly why we cancelled Paramount and won't watch CBS. I'm really hoping lots and lots of people do the same thing. These people ONLY listen and look at the bottom line regardless of what Trump says. Let's give them something to listen and look at.....mass cancellations. Disney sure listened.
Thank you Heather Delaney Reese. I appreciate all you do. I'm sure hoping that some Republicans will begin to use their brains, think about their constituents when voting. That means thinking. Not just doing something because dear leader wants it. Ballroom?? "Triumphal arch"?? Disgusting slush fund? Self dealing our tax dollars??? I sincerely hope some realize how ridiculous, childish this all is. And stop it.