Here is his first monologue after the news broke.
What surprised me is that Paramount gave him 10-month’s notice, saying that the end of the show would be in May 2026. As he said, that gives him the freedom to really let loose.
Jon Stewart also weighed in.
May 2026 is when Colbert’s current contract expires. To cancel him before that would probably cost them a big payout.
I hate to be a wet blanket here, but I get a strong feeling that “birthday card” form Trump is gonna turn out to be a fake — something “leaked” or planted by a Trump supporter to ultimately discredit everyone who tried to use it as evidence of a Trump-Epstein child-rape conspiracy.
Does anyone remember Dan Rather and those documents he tried to use to show Bush Jr. was a draft-dodger? Remember how they had little tells that proved they couldn’t possibly have been typed back in the 1960s? Bush Jr. and his chums used that to completely discredit both Rather and the entire case against Bush. I can easily see Retrumplitarians doing the same thing to discredit the case against Trump as a child-rapist. We really need to be careful with this (and it’s not like it really proves anything specific that can’t be proven with other documents and recollections anyway).
@Raging Bee:
In general you’re not wrong, this could be something to worry about… but this is the Wall Street Journal. Owned by Rupert Murdoch.
For one thing, Murdoch owns lots of other media, and frankly he’s part of the problem; he’s been actively trying to push things towards autocracies in multiple countries for a while.
For another, most of the actual MAGA cult movement aren’t exactly part of the WSJ’s main audience, so discrediting them this way isn’t exactly likely to work. The WSJ’s main audience is the people who are trying to keep the MAGA boiling over and too stupid to realize they’re being screwed with. Frankly, if it is a fake, I’d be more likely to assume the WSJ is in on it than a victim. And if the WSJ is in on it, well, admitting that is likely to cost them support with their real audience because they’re not ‘trustworthy’ anymore.
(Trump, obviously, is not in on it because he’s not capable of playing a role with enough subtlety to fake something like that, and the whole thing would work better if he’s reacting in his usual way, anyway.)
On top of that, I haven’t actually seen too many people using this as ‘evidence’ of anything yet. They’ve been reporting that this is being reported, sure, but as you say, there’s really nothing this implies that we didn’t already know from other sources.
The only real net effect of this has been to get Trump to scream at people even more than usual, and getting him to ban any WSJ reporters from Correspondent’s events, even though the now-banned reporter that usually covered the White House isn’t one of the ones that broke this story. Which, if the WSJ is in on it, means they’re willing to throw some of their own people overboard for it. (Which is nothing new, the news and editorial parts of the WSJ have been in an off-and-on cold war for decades.)
So, yeah, don’t use this as evidence of anything, I’ll agree with that, because we have lots of other evidence anyway. But I’m not so sure about the ‘fake’ part.
@Raging bee
In todays world , does it matter ?
Everything fake is true , up is down, left is right and we ere always at war with Eurasia.
The WSJ is now reporting that Bondi told Trump back in May that he appears multiple times in the Epstein files. I think it’s extremely unlikely they are deliberately providing fake news (I mean real fake news) in order to discredit Trump’s critics, and highly unlikely they have accidentally published fake news seeded by Trump’s supporters, as Raging Bee suggests -- they are extremely careful about what factual claims they publish. What Trump and those around him want is quite clear: for the whole affair to disappear from the news altogether. The WSJ has also been very critical of Trump on the tariffs: their audience is not the MAGAts, but the rich scumbags exploiting the MAGAts, who are mostly economic globalisers. Murdoch himself can and does play to both audiences through different outlets.