The Moment
Donald Trump spent the early hours of Christmas Eve raging about a rerun.
According to a December 24 report from DailyMailUS, the former president jumped on Truth Social after CBS re-aired a December 8 episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The monologue in question poked fun at Trump’s hosting of this year’s Kennedy Center Honors, which CBS had just broadcast in prime time.
Trump unloaded on Colbert as a “pathetic trainwreck” with “no talent,” claiming the host’s ratings were “nonexistent.” Then he escalated, calling Colbert “a dead man walking” and saying CBS should “put him to sleep” immediately rather than wait for the show’s planned end in May. He framed it as the “humanitarian” thing to do.
In a separate post, he threatened that CBS’s broadcast license could be in jeopardy because Colbert is, in Trump’s words, “almost 100% Negative to President Donald J. Trump, MAGA, and the Republican Party.” He wrapped the overnight flurry of posts with a sharp “MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!” around 1 a.m., per the same report.
The Take
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you’re up at 1 a.m. demanding a TV network “put” a comedian “to sleep” over a rerun, the ratings problem might not be the comedian’s.
Trump’s latest meltdown isn’t just another round of “late-night host vs. politician.” It’s a reminder that for him, late night is still a mirror he cannot stop screaming at. Colbert’s old monologue gets recycled, triggers the memory of that Kennedy Center stage, and suddenly we’re back in 2016, except everyone’s a little older, a lot more tired, and network TV is hanging on by a thread.
Let’s be clear: Trump’s language is legally couched as insult and metaphor, not a literal call for violence – but describing a critic as a “dead man walking” and saying he should be “put to sleep” is ugly, dehumanizing talk. At minimum, it’s a powerful man aiming deranged cruelty at a guy who tells jokes for a living.
And for what? A monologue. A few punchlines about Trump worrying if he can “beat” Jimmy Kimmel as a host, Colbert noting that he used to host the Honors, and a jab at that much-mocked “FIFA Peace Prize” moment. This is standard-issue late-night snark, not a federal case.
The whole thing feels like watching a divorced couple still fighting over who got the couch. Late night moved on to streaming clips and viral desk bits. Viewers moved on to podcasts and TikTok. Yet Trump is still fighting the last TV war, measuring his worth in Nielsen numbers and monologue minutes.
Here’s the quieter truth: Colbert isn’t being “terminated” in disgrace; he’s the face of an expensive, aging format in a cost-cutting era. CBS has said money, not MAGA, is the issue. That may sting Trump more than any joke – the idea that this might not even be about him.
Does Colbert sometimes go hard? Absolutely. The July “go f**k yourself” moment was him basically giving up on pretending this is a normal president-late-night relationship. But that’s still speech vs. speech. What Trump keeps reaching for is speech vs. punishment: lose your job, lose your show, maybe even lose your license.
If you grew up with Johnny Carson or even Jay Leno, it’s jarring. The old deal was: politicians get zinged, they roll their eyes, maybe they show up for a couch segment to prove they can take a joke. Now we’re in an era where a single rerun can produce a multi-post tantrum about “putting” the host “to sleep.”
Underneath the drama is something pretty simple: a man who cannot stand that a roomful of people laughed at his expense, even when it happened weeks ago, on a taped show, replayed after his own big TV moment. Late night isn’t Trump’s obsession because of the jokes. It’s his obsession because it’s one of the few places he doesn’t control the spotlight.
Receipts
Confirmed:
- DailyMailUS reported on December 24, 2025, that Trump posted multiple Truth Social messages attacking Stephen Colbert after CBS re-aired a December 8 episode of The Late Show that mocked Trump’s hosting of the Kennedy Center Honors.
- Those posts, as quoted in that report, called Colbert a “pathetic trainwreck” with “no talent,” described him as a “dead man walking,” and urged CBS to “put him to sleep” “NOW.”
- Trump also suggested CBS’s broadcast license could be at risk because, in his view, Colbert is “almost 100% Negative to President Donald J. Trump, MAGA, and the Republican Party,” and ended the posts with “MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!”
- CBS previously announced in an official corporate statement this summer that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will end in May for financial and strategic reasons, not due to any one guest or monologue.
- On a July broadcast of his show, Colbert reacted to Trump celebrating that cancellation by telling Trump, “Go f**k yourself,” with the profanity censored on air.
- In the December 8 monologue, as summarized in the DailyMailUS report and clips shared online, Colbert played footage of Trump talking about out-performing Jimmy Kimmel as a host, quipped “You can’t and you shouldn’t,” and noted that he himself had previously hosted the Kennedy Center Honors.
Unverified or Clearly Opinion:
- Trump’s claims that Colbert’s ratings are “nonexistent” and that he has “no talent” are subjective opinions, not backed by public ratings data in the reporting.
- The suggestion that CBS’s broadcast license could or should be pulled over Colbert’s criticism of Trump is a political claim, not something supported by any regulatory action.
- Any implication that CBS ended Colbert’s show specifically because of his Trump material goes beyond what the network has stated; CBS has cited broader financial and strategic reasons.
Backstory (For Casual Readers)
Trump and late-night TV have been locked in a mutually profitable grudge match for nearly a decade. When Trump first ran for president, hosts like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and others leaned hard into political monologues, and their ratings often surged when they took sharp aim at him. Trump, in turn, has repeatedly attacked them as untalented, biased, and out of touch.
Colbert, a veteran of The Colbert Report, rebuilt his CBS show around political satire during Trump’s presidency, which helped make him a consistent ratings leader in the late-night field for several years. Meanwhile, the Kennedy Center Honors – once a relatively quiet, bipartisan celebration of the arts – has become more politicized in the Trump era, from boycotts during his presidency to this year’s drama over his role as host and chair of the Kennedy Center’s board.
Layer on top of that the larger industry story: traditional late-night talk shows on broadcast networks are expensive, and audiences are shrinking as viewers move to streaming and social clips. CBS deciding to wind down Colbert’s show in May fits into a bigger pattern of networks trimming legacy formats, even when the hosts are still recognizable stars.
What’s Next
CBS is not going to yank a broadcast license because a former president is mad about a monologue, so we can take that off the table. The more realistic questions are: Does Colbert answer this latest tirade on air when new episodes resume? Does he treat it as another punchline, or is he over the bit?
Trump, for his part, has shown he’s not done waging war on what’s left of old-school television. If a rerun can spark this kind of language, expect every clip package, awards show, or farewell tribute to be met with more all-caps posts about “FAKE” honors and “NO TALENT” hosts.
For viewers, especially those who remember sneaking out of bed to watch Carson’s monologue, the bigger story may be the slow end of late night as we knew it. Colbert’s exit marks another step toward a future where the “monologue” lives mostly as a two-minute social video, not something you stay up to watch at 11:35.
The irony? In trying so hard to shut Colbert up, Trump may actually end up making his final months on air more relevant – and more watched – than they otherwise would have been. Nothing boosts a closing show like fresh controversy.
Your turn: Do you think late-night hosts like Colbert have gone too hard on Trump, or is his latest “put him to sleep” rant exactly why we still need comics to hold powerful people up to ridicule?
Sources: Donald Trump posts on Truth Social quoted in coverage; DailyMailUS, “Trump calls for ‘talentless’ late-night host to be ‘put to sleep’ in vicious tirade,” December 24, 2025; CBS corporate announcement about the planned end of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, summer 2025 (financial/strategic rationale).
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