NEW YORK (AP) — On his very first time hosting “The Late Show” back in 2015, Stephen Colbert ripped into Donald Trump while gorging on Oreos, likening his inability to resist the cookies to his inability to resist going after the then-presidential candidate.“Look, you don’t own me. I don’t need to play tape of you to have a successful TV show,” he warned an image of Trump. “Someone on television should have a modicum of dignity and it could be me.”Over the next 11 years, Colbert couldn’t curb his appetite for making Trump barbs, often turning his show into a full-throated rebuke of MAGA policies. Trump would call him a “dead man walking.”
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The on-air feud between the two men seemingly ends Thursday as Colbert’s top-rated late-night TV program goes off the air for the final time, effectively silencing a high-profile White House critic.“The legacy of this show needs to be that we remember it as the show that was canceled because a presidential administration wanted it off the air,” says Heather Hendershot, a professor of communication studies and journalism at Northwestern University. “We haven’t connected every single dot on that, but it’s very clear that this was a political decision. And I think 20, 30, 40 years later, that is going to be strongly remembered about this show — that this was a moment of authoritarian triumph.”
