Late-night satire serves as a boundary space in public life—metabolising rage, ridiculing power, and sustaining reflexivity through ritualised negation. From Germany’s Magazin Royale to HBO’s Last Week Tonight, Zondag met Lubach in the Netherlands, or Spain’s El Intermedio—the late show marks a liminal hour where critique is licensed, contradiction voiced, and authority mocked without reprisal. At night, the jester reigns: holding the sovereign to account through subversive truth-telling within the tolerated perimeter of oppositional speech.
Until he crosses the line. On July 17th, CBS killed the highly successful Late Show with Stephen Colbert—the longest-running franchise in network history—invoking “financial necessity.” The execution came days after Colbert denounced Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Trump as “a big fat bribe,” just ahead of regulatory approval for the Skydance merger. Trump exulted on Truth Social: “Colbert is DONE! These losers had it coming.”
What began as ritual satire became real accusation. Colbert had performed symbolic castration, violating the terms of permitted contradiction by exposing the inflated king’s corruption and disrupting the regime’s economy of truth. But Trump’s malignant narcissistic order cannot tolerate humiliation; it must annihilate it. The imaginary kingdom relies on uninterrupted applause to preserve the sovereign’s coherence—when the trickster became a threat, the system struck back.
Here, business revealed its complicity—not as selfish owner but as cowardly censor. “Business as usual” became a discourse of preemptive obedience, displacing structural conflict for violence of transparency. The economic smokescreen of financial optimisation offered moral cover: efficiency, shareholder value, fiduciary responsibility. By announcing a 2026 end date, CBS obscured causality—framing the act as procedural rather than political.
The meaning lies in what remains unsaid. Trump’s revenge is libidinal, economic and structural. Colbert’s public decapitation enacts exclusion—not just silencing a voice, but redefining which forms of speech are irrational, impermissible, and economically absurd.
The jester has always held democracy’s most precarious role—but in late capitalism, dissent isn’t silenced by force; it is simply priced out of existence. When business and authoritarianism collude, media no longer informs—it aligns. The result is not just symbolic sterilisation but governmentality: the “invisible hand” reveals itself as the empire’s grip, disciplining discourse through financial coercion.
But in guillotining the jester, the regime not only performs narrative erasure—it denies the public the power to reflectively examine the emplotment of political meaning. Democracy loses its mirror.
“These losers had it coming,” said the Orange King. “The gloves are off,” the Jester replied. Let’s hope so. Because the real loser—is us.
#leadership
Original image:
Selected Q&A
Q- This is a sharp post, but I’d add a wrinkle. I wrote a PhD chapter on The Colbert Report, and what made that version of Colbert powerful was precisely his ironic stance: he became the absurdity, reflecting power back at itself. It was subtle, layered, disarming. By the time he moved to The Late Show, that mask was gone. Irony gave way to sarcasm. It became partisan ridicule rather than meta-critique—a shift from destabilising the narrative to merely shouting over it. While the cancellation smells of opportunism, a financial pruning that also conveniently silences a critic ahead of a Trump-linked merger, I’d argue Colbert’s cultural power had already diminished. Not because the issues weren’t real, but because his format no longer invited reflective engagement. It flattened into catharsis for the already-convinced. The tragedy isn’t just that the jester was guillotined. It’s that we no longer know how to host jesters who hold paradox, rather than punch down party lines. Trump said: “These losers had it coming.” The deeper loss? We’ve mistaken sarcasm for subversion and stopped listening for the joke that tells the truth.
A- Great points! And yes—I thought you’d appreciate the jester story. I actually considered that angle too, but opted for a more single-minded interpretation, since I was particularly drawn to the idea that capitalism systematically squeezes out dissent. I fully support your broader reading. As always, compressing complex argument into 3,000 characters produces a kind of necessary simplification—sometimes delightfully so, though it also risks flattening nuance. That said, much like your portrait of the true jester, our task here is partly to provoke deeper thought: to open up alternative interpretations that unsettle hegemony, or at the very least invite a moment of critical reflection.