Trump’s Ugly New Attack on Stephen Colbert Reveals Dark Side of Firing

THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

The New Republic

News, Politics

4.4 • 800 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As you’ve heard, CBS has ended “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Troublingly, this comes just after Paramount, which owns CBS, settled President Trump’s frivolous lawsuit against it by paying out $16 million dollars. Only days before the firing, Colbert called the deal a “big fat bribe.” Now Trump has just praised the firing in a vile new attack on Colbert. Trump laughably insisted that Colbert has no talent and can’t measure up to Fox News hosts (who praise Trump relentlessly). We think Trump deliberately wants us to think CBS fired Colbert precisely because CBS hoped it would curry favor with Trump, enhancing impressions of his authoritarian power. We talked about all this with Michael Sozan of the Center for American Progress, author of a good piece excoriating Paramount’s settlement with Trump. We discussed why Trump makes his corrupt bullying of the media explicit, how this represents a broader textbook imitation of autocratic regimes abroad, and what we should all do in response. Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.
0:16.5	I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
0:31.0	By now, you've heard that CBS has canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
0:36.8	What makes this even more troubling is that it comes just after Paramount, which owns CBS,
0:38.9	settled a lawsuit with President Trump by paying out $16 million in what many are describing as functionally a bribe.
0:46.0	CBS denies that it ended Colbert's show to curry favor with Trump, claiming it's a purely
0:50.9	financial decision, but the firing comes after Colbert himself
0:55.2	called the settlement with Trump a big, fat bribe. And now Trump just praised the decision to fire
1:02.4	Colbert in a vile attack he unleashed on Colbert, which claimed he has no talent and can't
1:07.9	measure up to the brilliant minds of Fox News. We're talking about all this today with
1:12.5	Michael Sousan, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, who recently had a good
1:17.2	piece spelling out the dangers of Paramount Settlement with Trump. Michael, good to have you on.
1:22.5	Good to be on with you, Greg. Thanks. So let's back up a bit and start with Paramount settlement with Trump. This came after
1:29.9	Trump sued CBS, accusing it of deceptive editing. It was a preposterous claim and many legal experts
1:36.7	said CBS would have won if it had litigated, but Paramount settled instead. Can you walk us through
1:42.7	why that itself is so disturbing?
1:45.1	That case was the flimsyest of cases from the very beginning when Donald Trump brought it.
1:50.7	You might remember he sued for $20 billion with a B, which was just insane from the beginning.
1:56.5	And all the legal experts that said, look, of course, news entities have the First Amendment right to edit interviews the way that they want to.
2:06.2	And so from the beginning, that suit should have been laughed out of court.
2:09.5	And actually Paramount itself, its lawyers, continued to argue in court documents that this was an absurd case that wasn't founded in the law at all.
2:19.7	And Trump kept on it day after day demanding that there be some sort of settlement.
	...

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