Late night host Stephen Colbert has broken his silence on the possibility that his show was canceled for political reasons, telling GQ magazine that he believes it’s “reasonable” to associate CBS’ axing of his top-rated show with a settlement made in a lawsuit filed by President Trump. But Colbert stopped short of making that claim himself, insisting “my side of the street is clean.”
Colbert graces the cover of this month’s GQ and was interviewed by Zach Baron as one of the magazine’s 2025 Men of the Year and in the accompanying interview, one of the first Colbert has sat for since the news broke that the network is canceling The Late Show — his iteration as well as the entire long-running franchise — after he took over as host 10 years ago. The magazine asks him about the unceremonious axing of the long-running show and whether he believes there is truth in speculation that it was politically motivated.
In the interview, Colbert quips that his is “the first number one show to ever get canceled.” For the last nine years, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has taken the top spot in the late night category, besting competition from his friends Jimmy Kimmel on ABC and Jimmy Fallon on NBC, among other contenders who have emerged over the past near-decade.
Prior to the announcement of the show’s cancellation, CBS had controversially settleed a lawsuit filed by President Trump against the network and its crown jewel news program, 60 Minutes, to the tune of $16 million. Many speculated the network saw this as a small price to pay amid the upcoming merger of its parent company Paramount Global with Skydance, the closing of which hinged on approval by the FCC and its Trump-appointed top dog. As this news was unfolding, Colbert, on his show, spoke of the settlement, saying it has a “technical name in legal circles. It’s: big fat bribe.” Shortly thereafter Colbert received the news from his manager that the current season of The Late Show will be its last.
“My reaction as a professional in show business is to go: That is the network’s decision,” Colbert told GQ. “I can understand why people would have that reaction because CBS or the parent corporation — I’m not going to say who made that decision, because I don’t know; no one’s ever going to tell us — decided to cut a check for $16 million to the president of the United States over a lawsuit that their own lawyers, Paramount’s own lawyers, said is completely without merit. And it is self-evident that that is damaging to the reputation of the network, the corporation and the news division. So it is unclear to me why anyone would do that other than to curry favor with a single individual.”
Colbert was told that the reason for the cancellation was financial, and that the network was getting out of the late night TV game. This is the official reason that was presented by the network when the show’s ending in May 2026 was announced. CBS cited the decision as “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.” In the interview, he stopped short of endorsing any sort of quid-pro-quo between the network or others and the Trump administration, and whether the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was a sacrificial lamb.
“So people can have their theories. I have my feelings about not doing the show anymore, but you’d have to show me why that’s a fruitful relationship for me to have with my network for the next nine months, for me to engage in that speculation,” he told the magazine. “I have had a great relationship with CBS. It’s one of the reasons why this was so surprising and so shocking that there was no preamble to this. We do budgets and everything like that. We’ve done cuts and stuff like that. So that’s why it was surprising to me, as I said, but I meant what I said [on air] the next night after I found out, because I couldn’t sit on it.”
Following the July announcement, speculation was rampant regarding CBS’s decision and it was not confined to Reddit threads and other areas of online discourse. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff both openly questioned whether this was a politically motivated decision after Colbert’s comic critiques of Trump and his presidency.
Colbert, the new interview, points to the fact that the network’s attorneys at one point called the lawsuit meritless but still distanced himself from such speculation about the motivations and inner workings of the executive team and the decisions they have made.
The final episode of The Late Showwith Stephen Colbert will air sometime in May 2026. The show won the Emmy for best talk series this year; Colbert received a standing ovation as he accepted the award.
