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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Americans reject MAGA meanness as ‘Superman’ soars

As voices that are independent and critical of the current administration vanish, please support PoliticusUSA by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now In a shocking move, CBS announced that it would cancel Late Night With Stephen Colbert in May 2026 and exit the late-night television business completely. Colbert told his audience at Thursday’s taping: Next year will be our last season. The network will be ending our show in May. It’s the end of ‘The Late Show’ on CBS. This is all just going away. I do want to say that the folks at CBS have been great partners. I’m so grateful to the Tiffany network for giving me this chair and this beautiful theater to call home. And of course, I’m grateful to you, the audience, who have joined us every night in here, out there, all around the world. The news is not a complete shock as the Trump-allied Ellison brothers are taking over CBS, and one of their goals is to remove Trump critics from the network. PoliticusUSA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. It was first speculated a few weeks ago that both Stephen Colbert at CBS and Jon Stewart at the now Ellison-owned The Daily Show could be pushed off the air. It was viewed to be less likely that Colbert would be canceled because the show is usually the highest rated in late night, and CBS spent decades struggling in late night until David Letterman moved over from NBC. The Trump impact on media is very real. Since Trump returned to office, critics of his administration have been removed from mainstream media. If Colbert wants to continue his late-night show, if the decision to pick him up was strictly about business, networks would be tripping over themselves to sign him. Where Colbert ends up next should be viewed as a test of the media’s willingness to stand up to Trump. If Stephen Colbert quickly finds a new high-profile home, it will be a hopeful sign. If not, the loss of Colbert will reflect the mainstream media’s complete cave to Trump.

PoliticusUSA is solely supported by readers like you. Please consider supporting us by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now The Wall Street Journal is a conservative mainstream publication that will never be mistaken as liberal, which is why the fact that the WSJ was preparing to publish a big story on Trump’s close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein sent the president into a panic. The Status newsletter reported: The article, said to be in the works for days, had still not appeared as of Thursday afternoon—raising eyebrows and fueling speculation across Washington and New York. According to people familiar with the matter, The Journal is facing pressure from the White House over the story. In fact, Trump is said to have personally called Emma Tucker, The Journal’s editor-in-chief, to voice his objections. The specifics of the call remain unclear, but it’s hard to imagine Trump voiced anything but outrage. It’s unclear whether Trump reached out to Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation owns The Journal. While the specifics of what The Journal intends to report remain under wraps, the story is said to contain new material shedding light on the Trump-Epstein relationship. PoliticusUSA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. If it were CNN, The Washington Post, or The New York Times that had this story, the White House might not be so frantic to kill it. The administration would attack the story as fake news and count on the fact that those media outlets had been poisoned long ago, so the odds of Trump’s supporters believing anything from those sources are minimal. The Wall Street Journal is a different story. An exclusive that contains bombshells from the Journal is likely to be believed across the political spectrum. If there is nothing to the story, Trump could have squashed it during his first term by releasing everything. The Epstein conspiracy theories were born because the Trump administration was shady after Epstein died in prison. Once Trump lost the 2020 election, he leaned into the Epstein conspiracies and tried to use them for political gain. The crisis that this administration is dealing with currently is Trump’s creation. Donald Trump responded to his supporters’ expectation that he would keep his campaign promise to release everything on Epstein by trying to shut them down. The story isn’t going anywhere, and with outlets like The Wall Street Journal digging around, the odds are high that it could get much worse. It isn’t the 34 fraud felony convictions or the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit that has done the most damage to Trump. Two impeachments and allegations of collaborations with a hostile foreign power bounced off of Donald Trump like they were nothing. What is sticking to Donald John Trump is Jeffrey Epstein. When Trump’s second term began, no one would have said that by the summer of 2025, Trump’s biggest problem would be Jeffrey Epstein. Even if Trump is able to kill the WSJ story, there will be others. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt faced multiple Epstein questions at the briefing on Thursday. If the most comfortable lap dogs in the corporate press are challenging the Trump administration on this, the dam is about to break, and even bigger problems could be coming. What do you think about Trump trying to kill the WSJ story? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Subscribe now