Stephen Colbert on Paramount's $16m settlement with Trump: ‘Big fat bribe'
Stephen Colbert returned to The Late Show on Monday after two weeks in Turkey – 'I heard so many great things from Mayor Adams about it,' he quipped – to blast his network's parent company, Paramount, for settling with Donald Trump for $16m. 'As someone who has always been a proud employee of this network, I am offended,' he said. 'And I don't know if anything will ever repair my trust in this company. But just taking a stab at it, I'd say $16m would help.'
The settlement ended a 'nuisance lawsuit' filed by Trump, claiming that CBS News deceptively edited their interview with then presidential candidate Kamala Harris last fall. 'Paramount knows they could have fought it,' Colbert explained, because the company itself called the lawsuit 'completely without merit'.
'And keep in mind, Paramount produced Transformers: Rise of the Beast – they know completely without merit,' he joked.
The settlement did not include an apology, though Colbert didn't equate that with defiance. He imagined a statement for them: 'You may take our money, but you will never take our dignity. You may, however, purchase our dignity for the low, low price of $16m. We need the cash.'
Given that Paramount's owners are pushing the Trump administration to approve the sale of CBS to Skydance, it's a settlement by one name or, as Colbert put it, 'a big fat bribe' by another.
Colbert then turned his attention to infighting in the Trump administration, after the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, released a statement that the Department of Justice and the FBI found 'no incriminating client list' of financier Jeffrey Epstein's nor 'credible evidence … that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals', thus contradicting Maga conspiracists.
'You can't take this away from your base! That is Maga's favorite conspiracy!' Colbert laughed. 'What are we going to find out next? That immigrants aren't eating cats? That if you sail to the horizon, you don't fall off the world?'
In a long screed on Truth Social, Trump decried the 'selfish people' who were 'trying to hurt [Maga], all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein'.
'Wait, wait?! Maga, you heard your leader – Jeffrey Epstein is alive!' Colbert joked. 'That can mean only one thing: zombie Epstein. He's coming for our brains, and thank goodness, because I do not want to think of him any more.'
'Maga-world, for the first time in memory, isn't just slavishly acquiescing to Trump's reality distortion field,' said Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, referring to the backlash against Trump by his own base over the Epstein files his administration now claims don't exist.
'These are all people who work for Trump that set the expectation,' Stewart explained. 'In a few months' time, we went from 'the Epstein files will expose the Democrats' to 'the Epstein files were written by the Democrats and therefore can't be trusted, so let's move on'.'
Stewart showed videos of Trump supporters booing the news that the Epstein files allegedly do not exist, or burning their Maga hats.
'Maga world is now in open revolt,' Stewart relished. 'Clearly telling your base to just forget about Epstein isn't working.'
'Maga is losing their shit right now,' he added. 'They cannot believe what they're seeing. Trump is lying? Dismissing reasonable concerns as bad-faith whining? Attacking anyone who disagrees?'
'As a resident of blue America, can I just say right now to my red colleagues that my pronouns are 'how does' and 'my ass taste',' he continued. 'The Trump that you're just experiencing now, to your deep disappointment and dismay, is the dude we've been dealing with the whole fucking time. You just didn't realize it because he's been nice to you.'
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers also mocked the Maga infighting over Epstein, which is 'a monster of their own making', he said. 'They made the Epstein conspiracy the center of their worldview, despite the fact that Trump and Epstein were photographed together and partied together, and Trump called Epstein a 'terrific guy' and Epstein called Trump his 'closest friend for 10 years'. Maga ignored all that, and hyper-fixated on the Epstein story.'
Meyers played clips of prominent Trump supporters including JD Vance, conspiracy podcast host turned deputy FBI director Dan Bongino and even Donald Trump Jr calling for the release of the so-called 'Epstein tapes'.
And yet the Department of Justice no claims there is no list, which directly contradicts what Bondi said in an interview with Fox News in February: that the list was 'sitting on my desk right now to review'. Bondi now claims that it was merely the file on her desk, which did not contain a list. 'Are we really going to believe that anyone in the world would have the Epstein file on their desk and not immediately take a peek?' Meyers wondered. 'I mean, who has that kind of restraint?'
'Maga accomplished nothing, because they believe in nothing,' he concluded of the mess. 'The only two things that held them together were a cult-like devotion to Trump and their conspiracy theories. And now that those are butting up against each other, they're imploding.
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